Deity Quotes - page 5
I wouldn't say that I'm an orthodox Christian at all and the longer we live in the twentieth century the more fantastic discoveries are made, the more we hear what the universe is like I find it very difficult to be a kind of orthodox believer in Jesus as my saviour and that sort of thing. I'm more interested in the extraordinary nature of God. If there is God, if there is deity, then He, even as the old hymn says, He moves in a mysterious way and I'm fascinated by that mystery and I've tried to write out of that experience of God, the fantastic side of God, the quarrel between the conception of God as a person, as having a human side, and the conception of God as being so extraordinary. ... So these are still things that occupy me, and every now and again, if you're lucky, you're able to make a poem out of this conception of God ... so I suppose I'm trying to appeal to people to open their eyes and their minds to the extraordinary nature of God.
R. S. Thomas
From a study of the discourses of the Buddha preserved in the Pali Canon, it will be seen that the idea of a personal deity, a creator god conceived to be eternal and omnipotent, is incompatible with the Buddha's teachings. ... Conceptions of an impersonal godhead of any description, such as world-soul, etc., are excluded by the Buddha's teachings on Anatta, non-self or unsubstantiality.
Nyanaponika Thera
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life - that in me has rest,
As I - undying Life - have power in Thee!
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main...
Emily Brontë
Only the actual conception of the divine nature changes according to the different ideas of perfection which prevail in particular ages and nations. The gods of the remoter ages of Greece and Rome, and those worshipped by our own earliest forefathers, were simply ideals of bodily strength and prowess. As the idea of sensuous beauty arose and gradually became refined, the sensuous personification of beauty was exalted to the throne of deity; and hence arose what we might call the religion of art. When men ascended from the sensuous to the purely spiritual, from the beautiful to the good and true, the sum of all moral and intellectual perfection became the object of their adoration, and religion became the province of philosophy.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Shakespeare is the Spinosistic deity - an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, - epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
One of the most important elements of Christian religion is the idea that justice is an essential quality of God. Since God is the absolute, his justice must be absolute justice, that is to say, eternal and unchangeable. Only a religion whose deity is supposed to be just can play a role in social life. To attribute justice to the deity in order to make religion applicable to human relations implies a certain tendency of rationalizing something which, by its very nature, is irrational-the transcendental being, the religious authority, and its absolute qualities.
Hans Kelsen
You may ask - you are bound to ask me now: What, then, is in your opinion the value of natural science? I answer: Its scope, aim and value is the same as that of any other branch of human knowledge. Nay, none of them alone, only the union of all of them, has any scope or value at all, and that is simply enough described: it is to obey the command of the Delphic deity: gnothi seauton... get to know yourself!
Erwin Schrödinger
What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression-and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food?
Ernest Becker
The hymns were unfamiliar to him, but he quickly picked up the general beat. The hymns had a redundant simplicity; the same phrases and tones appeared and reappeared. The same monotonous ideas, repeated indefinitely. The appetite of (Tetragrammaton) was insatiable, he concluded. A childish, nebulous personality that required constant praise-and in the most obvious terms. Quick to anger, (Tetragrammaton) was equally quick to sink into euphoria, was eager and ready to lap up these blatant flatteries.
A balance. A method of lulling the Deity. But what a delicate mechanism. Danger for everyone...The easily-aroused Presence that was always nearby. Always listening.
Philip K. Dick
Extracting out, extracting out, thousands of literary heroes until you get to the one that embodies that which is most heroic in all the rest. That's a religious deity. That's what Christ is. The extracting out is exactly what the Scriptures were doing previously. The extracting out is the process of scriptural development and prophesy. The prophets extracted, extracted, extracted until they saw the ideal. The saw the ideal that had never before been seen before. In seeing the ideal, they called for it. They prophesied that it would come. And then it did. And then it changed the world.
Jordan Peterson
Each of the most basic physical laws that we know corresponds to some invariance, which in turn is equivalent to a collection of changes which form a symmetry group. ...whilst leaving some underlying theme unchanged. ...for example, the conservation of energy is equivalent to the invariance of the laws of motion with respect to translations backwards or forwards in time... the conservation of linear momentum is equivalent to the invariance of the laws of motion with respect to the position of your laboratory in space, and the conservation of angular momentum to an invariance with respect to directional orientation... discovery of conservation laws indicated that Nature possessed built-in sustaining principles which prevented the world from just ceasing to be. There were fewer roles for the Deity to play...
John D. Barrow
Your disciples will expect something even grander from you. They'll want you to become a deity.”
She snickered and said, "I'm not ruling out that possibility.”
"What sort of deity? A hamadryad? Plato's demiurge? The Creator God of Judeo-Christian revelation?”
"That job's already taken,” she said.
"But you could do it better,” I said.
"When it comes to the physics, no, but in other areas-you're right.
James K. Morrow
There (in Mithilā) is settled the city of Janaka which is the crest-jewel (vasu) of the earth (vasumati); the upholder of the Karma as enunciated by the Brāhmaṇas (vasumukhamukhas – the mouths of Agni, who is the chief among the Vasus) and righteousness; the subduer of sins; the destroyer of sorrows; the pleasant destination; supremely spectacular; whose feet are bowed down to by all deities; the good nourisher of pure [forms of] abstention, love and devotion; the remover of doubts; the palace for the pleasure of Rāma; the birthplace of the paramour of the best amongst Raghus; and the cause of fear in [even] the son of Sūrya (Yama, the deity of death). ॥ 2.3 ॥.
Rāmabhadrācārya
Him, who was with the charm of the Tripuṇḍra and whose favourite deity was Rāma; him, who was bearing the axle of the lustre of the ornament [in the form of the nascent moon] and who was agreeable by this joy; him, who was the protector of the bearer of the onus of Dharma with the power of his eminence; and him, who was endowed with the refuge of Rāma owing to the pleasantness of the resplendence of the bull-sign which stands for righteousness. ॥ 3.26 ॥.
Rāmabhadrācārya
