Quotes & Sayings About Deities

It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature. — Mary Wollstonecraft

I sacrifice to no god save myself- And to my belly, greatest of deities. — Euripides

Deities are invented by fallible and finite beings in the hope and desire to create immortal perfection; unfortunately, such deities only reflect their creators and inspire their followers to similar imperfections. — L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Superstition always inspires littleness, religion grandeur of mind; the superstitious raises beings inferior to himself to deities. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

In the interests of everyone the artist had a responsibility to use his medium well. In the Tibetan culture, most of the paintings are of deities or Buddhas, and they try to send a message of the value of the spiritual. — Dalai Lama

Love is one of the chief characteristics of Deity, and ought to be manifested by those who aspire to be the sons of God ... — Joseph Smith Jr.

It is the distinction between transpersonal and interpersonal relationships with deities which sets naturalistic polytheism apart from neopolytheism. Interpersonal relationships are between two or more persons and are focused upon individual perspectives. A transpersonal relationship extends beyond the individual perspective, transcending the distinctions of ego and personality. For example:
A neopolytheist has a close personal relationship with a modernized personification of Thor, to whom she prays to daily.
A naturalistic polytheist practices breathing as a sacrament which allows her to focus on life's connection to the atmosphere, altering her perception of separateness, resulting in viewing the at-mosphere as a deity." - Glen Gordon, "Naturalism and the Gods — John Halstead

The Charkha is the symbol of sacrifice, and sacrifice is essential for the establishment of the image of the deity. — Mahatma Gandhi

Life and the Universe show spontaneity;Down with ridiculous notions of Deity!Churches and creeds are lost in the mists;Truth must be sought with the Positivists. — Mortimer Collins

Let us not make a procrustean bed of trans issues and force deities of the past onto it, let us instead awaken trans and other gender-variant deities from their own beds! There is no possibility of blasphemy against existing powers and their human followers if the deities in question are our own, and we never have to "take them back," because they have always been ours to begin with! — P. Sufenas Virius Lupus

The forms of the central and surrounding deities ... should not be protruding like a clay statue or cast image, yet neither should they be flat like a painting. In contrast, they should be apparent, yet not truly existent, like a rainbow in the sky or the reflection of the moon in a lake. They should appear as though conjured up by a magician. Clear appearance involves fixing the mind one-pointedly on these forms with a sense of vividness, nakedness, lucidity, and clarity. — Jigme Lingpa

His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palms of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the slope that had never known the print of a boot, there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist - only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles. And — Evelyn Waugh

How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful, is man! ... Midway from nothing to the Deity! — Edward Young

If these key points are not understood, some people will neglect clear visualization and the holding of vajra pride, and concentrate solely on the repetition of mantra. Some will hold that the deities and pure realms exist in their own right, and so even though they engage in sadhana practice they will not awaken to buddhahood. Thus, you must understand these key points! — Dudjom Lingpa

You're like a god from a Greek myth, Saiman. You have no empathy. You have no concept of the world beyond your ego. Wanting something gives you an automatic right to obtain it by whatever means necessary with no regard to the damage it may do. I would be careful if I were you. Friends and objects of deities' desires dropped like flies. In the end the gods always ended up miserable and alone.
- Kate Daniels — Ilona Andrews

As Meander says, "For our mind is God;" and as Heraclitus, "Man's genius is a deity. — Plutarch

I came to Him because I did not know which way to turn. I remained with Him because there is no other way I wish to turn. I came to Him longing for something I did not have. I remain with Him because I have something I will not trade. I came to Him as a stranger. I remain with Him in the most intimate of friendships. I came to Him unsure about the future. I remain with Him certain about my destiny. I came amid the thunderous cries of a culture that has 330 million deities. I remain with Him knowing that truth cannot be all-inclusive. — Ravi Zacharias

Nearly all ancient peoples worshiped sex in some form and ritual, and not the lowest people but the highest expressed their worship most completely [ ... ]. The sexual character and functions of primitive deities were held in high regard, not through any obscenity of mind, but through a passion for fertility in women and in the earth. Certain animals, like the bull and the snake, were worshiped as apparently possessing or symbolizing in a high degree the divine power of reproduction.
The snake in the story of Eden is doubtless a phallic symbol, representing sex as the origin of evil, suggesting sexual awakening as the beginning of the knowledge of good and evil, and perhaps insinuating a certain proverbial connection between mental innocence and bliss. — Will Durant

Lyra, Cassiopeia the queen, whiplash Scorpius with the twin stings in his tail, all the friendly childhood patterns that had twinkled me to sleep from the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on my bedroom ceiling back in New York. Now, transfigured - cold and glorious like deities with their disguises flung off - it was as if they'd flown through the roof and into the sky to assume their true, celestial homes. — Donna Tartt

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. — Azar Nafisi

The Sanctuary and its deities were the main source of the city's income. Visitors paid to enter the city. They had to buy the correct apparel to perform rituals in the Sanctuary. They had to pay again to acquire offerings for the gods. Mecca was not just one of the world's oldest shrines, it was a citadel for capitalism. The people who oiled the wheels of Meccan religious life were known as Hums. — Ziauddin Sardar

O unfathomable depth! O Deity eternal! O deep ocean! What more could You give me than to give me Yourself? — St. Catherine Of Siena

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! — Michael Moorcock

The principle of love within us is an attribute of the Deity, and it is placed within us to be dispensed independently according to our own will. — Brigham Young

Beauties that from worth arise are like the grace of deities. — John Suckling

Venus of Eryx, from her mountain throne,
Saw Hades and clasped her swift-winged son, and said:
'Cupid, my child, my warrior, my power,
Take those sure shafts with which you conquer all,
And shoot your speedy arrows to the heart
Of the great god to whom the last lot fell
When the three realms were drawn. Your mastery
Subdues the gods of heaven and even Jove,
Subdues the ocean's deities and him,
Even him, who rules the ocean's deities.
Why should Hell lag behind? Why not there too
Extend your mother's empire and your own ... ?
Then Cupid, guided by his mother, opened
His quiver of all his thousand arrows
Selected one, the sharpest and the surest,
The arrow most obedient to the bow,
And bent the pliant horn against his knee
And shot the barbed shaft deep in Pluto's heart. — Ovid

In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Physical science has taught us to associate Deity with the normal rather than with the abnormal. — William Edward Hartpole Lecky

There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were. Of — Richard Dawkins

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

I'm free of an abusive cult, based on money and power that worships a fictional deity and safely back with the Catholic Church. — Katie Holmes

People who need to believe in deities can find them everywhere they look. — Graham Kendall

Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren't. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too afraid to be. Become whom they admire. People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won't settle for just a human being. — Chuck Palahniuk

the Singularity who hides behind the mask of the deity's personality. Worship of deities really means appreciating them for the skill with which they play their roles in the cosmic drama. You can also worship the One directly, but the One is undifferentiated, unqualified and absolute, while the world a jyotishi lives in is relative, qualified and differentiated. — Hart Defouw

Judaism, for example, presents itself as monotheistic and retrofits that claim on its history by revising its lore. But in ancient times, Judaism was much more accurately Henotheism, wherein people (particularly common folk) worshipped a principal god while accepting the existence of other deities, or Monolatrism, where many gods were acknowledged, but only one worshipped. — Thomas Daniel Nehrer

My mind is wholly possessed by Love, who rules every part there of, in virtue of his all-embracing deity. — Giovanni Boccaccio

There is nothing left to watch but fire and the night: circle within circle, light within light. Messages arrive in the net where discrete pulses cross. Parametal engines of joy and disaster give them wave and motion. We interpret and defeat their terms by terminus. The night? What of it. It is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen,
constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark. — Samuel R. Delany

Gods, rather than being outside entities, are personifications of what lies in our hearts. If this is true, then the many, varied gods of the human sects - deities of vastly different demeanors - reveal much about the race. — R.A. Salvatore

He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. Butwe would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in physics because they are true in ethics. — Henry David Thoreau

That's what I believe," said Ruth. "Peter didn't. Here was a man who was given everything. Talent, love, a peaceful place to live and create. And all he had to do was appreciate it." "And if he didn't?" "He would remain stone. And the deities would turn on him. They do, you know. They're generous, but they demand gratitude. — Louise Penny

In one breath, I can say that we are God, but in another I have to say that we aren't deities. — Alanis Morissette

Women know when men don't desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death - even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them. — John Irving

Within the hierarchy of fabrications that compose our lives - families, countries, gods - the self incontestably ranks highest. Just below the self is the family, which has proven itself more durable than national or ethnic affiliations, with these in turn outranking god-figures for their staying power. So any progress toward the salvation of humankind will probably begin from the bottom - when our gods have been devalued to the status of refrigerator magnets or lawn ornaments. Following the death rattle of deities, it would appear that nations or ethnic communities are next in line for the boneyard. Only after fealty to countries, gods, and families has been shucked off can we even think about coming to grips with the least endangered of fabrications - the self. — Thomas Ligotti

What is it about our specific belief in God and His wishes that makes us so angry at the specific beliefs of another? What is it about the teachings of our respective deities that makes us more right than the next person? Or more wrong? — Chuck Austen

Trade and religion were thus inextricably combined in Mecca. The pilgrimage to Mecca was the climax of the suq cycle, and the Quraysh reconstructed the cult and architecture of the sanctuary so that it became a spiritual center for all the Arab tribes. Even though the Bedouin were not much interested in the gods, each tribe had its own presiding deity, usually represented by a stone effigy. The Quraysh collected the totems of the tribes that belonged to their confederacy and installed them in the Haram so that the tribesmen could only worship their patronal deities when they visited Mecca. The sanctity of the Kabah was thus essential to the success and survival of the Quraysh, and their competitors understood this. — Karen Armstrong

One of the most amazing revelations of God comes to us when we learn that it is in the everyday things of life that we realize the magnificent deity of Jesus Christ. — Oswald Chambers

Religions understand this: they know that to sustain goodness, it helps to have an audience. The faiths hence provide us with a gallery of witnesses at the ceremonial beginnings of our marriages and thereafter they entrust a vigilant role to their deities. — Alain De Botton

Well, I think the Yoruba gods are truthful. Truthful in the sense that i consider religion and the construct of deities simply an extension of human qualities taken, if you like, to the nth degree. i mistrust gods who become so separated from humanity that enormous crimes can be committed in their names. i prefer gods who can be brought down to earth and judged, if you like. — Wole Soyinka

No one really believes in the gods of the New Age; they are deities not of the celestial hierarchy above but of the ornamental etagere in the corner, and their only "divine" office is to give symbolic expression to the dreamier sides of their votaries' personalities. They are purchased gods, gods as accessories, and hence are merely masks by means of which the one true god-the will-at once conceals and reveals itself.
It — David Bentley Hart

Hubbard set up the Church of Scientology in Hollywood in 1954 for a reason. He understood that celebrity was increasingly a feature of American public life, and celebrities themselves were going to be worshiped as minor deities were in the ancient world. The idea was: if you could get them, think how many people would follow. — Lawrence Wright

Sleep, thou repose of all things; sleep, thou gentlest of the deities; thou peace of the mind, from which care flies; who doest soothe the hearts of men wearied with the toils of the day, and refittest them for labor. — Ovid

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

The devil may be bullied, but not the Deity. — William Rounseville Alger

By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body. — Charles Lindbergh

For me, Rama and Rahim are one and the same deity. I acknowledge no other God but the one God of truth and righteousness. — Mahatma Gandhi

Leliana advanced like a predator, hair lashing like a whip behind her. She abandoned the reins, riding the horse like they had merged into one charging centaur.

She aroused images of deities on winged horses, of untamed forests in a windstorm, of legendary heroes of legendary quests. Burning desire shot straight to his loins at the sight of her.

He ached for this woman, this goddess that streaked across his vision like a figment of his imagination, of his deepest desires and most guarded wishes. He could lose himself, mind, body, and soul, to a woman like that. Any sane man would. — Natalia Marx

I am all deities in one. You may endeavour your best for thousands of years and have all mankind with you in your search. But you cannot understand My Reality. — Sathya Sai Baba

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

Fame, the sovereign deity of proud ambition. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A story. This was the key to immortality. The things that made kings quiver and deities distrustful: Nothing but a tale. — Roshani Chokshi

The Andrians were the first of the islanders to refuse Themistocles' demand for money. He had put it to them that they would be unable to avoid paying, because the Athenians had the support of two powerful deities, one called Persuasion and the other Compulsion.
The Andrians had replied that Athens was lucky to have two such useful gods, who were obviously responsible for her wealth and greatness; unfortunately, they themselves, in their small & inadequate land, had two utterly useless deities, who refused to leave the island and insisted on staying; and their names were Poverty and Inability. — Herodotus

I sing to you of the deities of the Dictyostelidal slime molds, sexless and strange, at once a thousand voices and one song united. I sing to you of hard times when the wood has rotted away and the sun bakes the earth, and while as individuals we die, together we thrive. The divinities ask for sacrifice, the thousand voices demand it. Those who die to give life to the others, who raise up the new generation so that they may spread far and wide - these become a part of that sacred host, their voices immortalized not in cells but in spirit." - Lupa, "The Forgotten Gods of Nature — John Halstead

Analysis is carried into everything. Even Deity is subjected to chemical tests. — James Russell Lowell

The world is fine and everything is normal and then, bang, you just get bowled over by the wrathful deities somehow. That happens in very small ways and happens in very large ways when you have a major conflagration in the world. It's another cycle of existence of human beings. — Bill Viola

Why seek the Deity further? Whatever we see is God, and wherever we go. — Lucan

The carved images on the early Minoan sealstones are tantalising, inscrutable. The Nature Goddess is yanked from the soil like a snake or a sheaf of barley; the Mistress of the Animals suckles goats and gazelles. There are male Adorants certainly - up on tiptoe, their outstretched arms hoisted in a kind of heil, their bodies arched suggestively, pelvis forward, before the Goddess - but there are no masculine deities, not a single one in sight. No woman worth her salt, one might think, could fail to be intrigued. — Alison Fell

I was descended from a handful of fertility deities, but I guess I really hadn't understood what that meant. I mean, there was fertile and then there was being able to get pregnant while you were already pregnant. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Possibly, mrs. laird ... i'd say. except he's dead, you see. well, not completely dead. he's more of a resurrected god. he judges mortal spirits and feeds the hearts of the wicked to his pet monster.oh, and he has blue skin. i'm sure he'd make quite an impression on career day, for all those students aspiring to grow up and become ancient egyptian deities — Serpent's Shadow Rick Riordan

Unlike many deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine husband or lover of any. — Elaine Pagels

I know there is only one
Governor
Of
Deities. — Toba Beta

The language in which the revealed Hindu texts are composed, namely, Sanskrit, has a neuter gender in addition to the masculine and feminine. In fact, the ultimate reality, the Supreme God of Hindus, is often described as neutral gender. A verse of Rigveda says that all the various deities are but descriptions of One Truth (ekam sat), and it is in neuter gender as if to emphasise that God is not male. — M. L. Ahuja

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful. — Jaron Lanier

Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-goddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of God. — Nicholas Ostler

The moral perfections of the Deity, the more attentively, we consider, the more perfectly still shall we know them. — Joseph Addison

Apparently, this Balaam seer was conscientious about earning his money. So after he spoke the blessing of Yahweh four times in favor of the Israelites, he gave the Midianites and Moabites some advice on how to undermine the blessing from within." "Indeed," said Sheshai. "Seduce them with women. As we all know, the way of man is such that if you please him sexually, he will give you anything and everything in return, even his soul. The Israelites have developed a liking for Moabite and Midianite women, and with them their local deities. Their god Yahweh is a jealous god who demands exclusive allegiance to him and the destruction of all other gods. One can only imagine the anger he now has toward his own people. — Brian Godawa

You do not say no to the girl with the deities. — Sarah Beth Durst

The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship. — Paul Theroux

Essentially I'm a pantheist-agnostic. I worship many deities with equal amounts of confusion. — Jonathan Ames

For we women are not only the deities of the household fire, but the flame of the soul itself. — Rabindranath Tagore

I've always accepted some kind of deity, especially as a songwriter. — Neil Diamond

Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity? — John Stuart Mill

Distinguisht Link in Being's endless Chain!
Midway from Nothing to the Deity! — Edward Young

Logograms pose a more difficult question. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from archy and mehitabel to PostScript and TrueType, come to the typographer in search of special treatment.In earlier days it was kings and deities whose agents demanded that their names be written in a larger size or set in a specially ornate typeface; not it is business firms and mass-market products demanding an extra helping of capitals, or a proprietary face, and poets pleading, by contrast, to be left entirely in the vernacular lower case. But type is visible speech, in which gods and men, saints and sinners, poets and business executives are treated fundamentally alike . Typographers, in keeping with the virtue of their trade, honor the stewardship of texts and implicitly oppose private ownership of words. — Robert Bringhurst

If Israel is to please the Lord fully, they will live lives that are as distinctive among the nations as their Lord is different from pagan deities. — Max Anders

A faithful friend is the true image of the Deity. — Napoleon Bonaparte

By virtue of the Deity thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As part of the great solar tradition that can be found in many places globally, the peoples of the ancient Near and Middle East revered a wide variety of sun deities, including the Babylonian Shamash and "god of the fathers," as well as the Canaanite goddess Shapash. These deities possessed numerous divine epithets and attributes adopted by biblical figures such as Yahweh, Samson and Jesus. — D.M. Murdock

All flows out from the Deity, and all must be absorbed in Him again. — Zoroaster

The heavens are nobly eloquent of the Deity, and the most magnificent heralds of their Maker's praise. — James Hervey

The deities have so many hidden great things in their skies agenda.
Some can't accept if humans ain't dominant in their scale of priorities. — Toba Beta

"Out, damned spot!" That is the true cry of human nature. That stain cannot be removed without blood and that which is infinitely more, and deeper, and profounder, and more terrible than blood, of which blood is but the symbol - the suffering of Deity. — G. Campbell Morgan

By getting as close to the true idea of religion, of spirituality as it is possible for us to get ... we would be in possession of the only tangible relationship tot the deity in things. — Marsden Hartley

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. — William Blake

When will she discover that I am from a lesser race of immortals? But the high deities have always needed pixies to persuade them down to earth. When she no longer needs an intermediary, will she still love me? — Ann-Marie MacDonald

It's against my programming to impersonate a deity. — Lawrence Kasdan

We are not on this planet to ask forgiveness of our deities. — Scott Cunningham

But what I learned from the Widow's Hand is that whose who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities — Salman Rushdie

You wish to hear the origin story?" "Uh, yes." I passed him the bottle. "Very well." He drank, handing it to Jack, starting another round. "A goddess of magic devised a contest to the death for select mortals. She invited deities of other realms to send a representative from their most prestigious house, all youths. Each one bore their god's emblem upon his or her right hand." My heart raced . . . I had been one of those youths. "These players would fight inside Tar Ro, a sacred realm as large as a thousand kingdoms, harvesting their victims' emblems; only the player who'd collected them all would leave Tar Ro alive. Naturally, the gods cheated, gifting their own representative with superhuman abilities, making them more than mortal. Secret abilities. That's why we're called Arcana." "Hail Tar Ro," I murmured. "The High Priestess told me that." "An old-fashioned greeting. She's quite knowledgeable about the games. Very respectful of the old ways. — Kresley Cole

A deity who remains silent and invisible should not get angry or surprised at doubt of his reality. — Graham Kendall