Quotes About Deities

I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you did---but the effort to appease or resist the reigning deities left you so exhausted that it prevented you from ever really having fun. To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime.

Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is to be worshipped. The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible. The book of Isaiah, with its insistence that "I alone am God, there is no other," is monotheistic. It represents the minority view in the Hebrew Bible.

Only a few deities associated with the Olympian cult apparently offered a satisfying personal relationship with their worshipers. Two of the most accessible figures were Asclepius and Dionysus, both of whom were born mortal and underwent suffering and death before achieving immortality, experiences that allowed them to bridge the gulf between humanity and divinity.

The application of reason revealed that reports of miracles were dubious, that the authors of holy books were all too human, that natural events unfolded with no regard to human welfare, and that different cultures believed in mutually incompatible deities, none of them less likely than the others to be products of the imagination. (As Montesquieu wrote, "If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.")

Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest.

The gods are watching, but idly, yawning.

Speak of the Gods as they are.

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

What the sacred grove was missing was a population. Not of gods, but of the ambassadors of gods. Those who, through need, call the deities into being. The

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.

Religion is at the core of a lot of Lovecraft's writing. Many of his stories focus around deities, sometimes taking on the role of aliens who are worshipped by humans as deities, who are either indifferent or actively hostile to humans. This is all particularly interesting as Lovecraft marked himself as either atheist or agnostic during his life.

...the Gods too love a joke.

She was no Christian. Instead she believed that every place and every thing had its own god or goddess; a nymph for a stream, a dryad for a wood, a spirit for a tree, a god for the fire and another for the sea. The Christian god, like Thor or Odin, was just one more deity among this unseen throng of powers, and her dreams, she said, were like eavesdropping on the gods. One day, as she rode beside me on the hills above the empty sea, she suddenly said that Alfred would give me power.

Earth: the tangible realm of mortal people and creatures • Spirit World: the realm of deities and spiritual beings—angels, fairies, djinn, and so forth • Dreamland: experiences in dreams really happen; just on a different plane of existence • Realm of the Dead: the after-life

Moreover, against those magic arts, concerning which some men, exceedingly wretched and exceedingly impious, delight to boast, may not public opinion itself be brought forward as a witness? For why are those arts so severely punished by the laws, if they are the works of deities who ought to be worshipped?

He stripped off the armor of institutional friendships To dedictate his soul To the terrible deities of Truth and Beauty.

Life's not easy, it is a hard task to live it well and with grace—but, by Hades, let's not complicate it with deities and water-nymphs!

One thing that I get from a lot of people with American Gods is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.

Cats must always be cats, even when they are gods, or constellations.

Though, if you think about it, hostile, dethroned pseudodeities probably make disagreeable neighbors. You'll have to figure out something to do with him.

Apparently, gods could cry.

Deities can actually own property in India, though the law treats them as minors, and they must be represented by an official guardian.

The immortal gods, the deities will rise, they will fall but none will live beyond the wall. Prometheus, knows love & saves them all.

Hippocrates, who practiced in ancient Greece and was considered by many to be the father of modern medicine, found himself imprisoned for many years when he rejected the idea that illness was the whim of deities. Yet by the time he died, he had revolutionized the practice of medicine and established the basic foundations of the role of the physician.