False Idol Quotes & Sayings

Self-righteousness ... is the largest idol of the human heart - the idol which man loves most and God hates most. Dearly beloved, you will always be going back to this idol. You are always trying to be something in yourself, to gain God's favour by thinking little of your sin, or by looking to your repentance, tears, prayers ; or by looking to your religious exercises, your frames, etc; or by looking to your graces, the Spirit's work in your heart. Beware of false Christs. Study sanctification to the utmost, but make not a Christ of it. — Robert Murray M'Cheyne

Democracy is just a false idol - a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilizations. — H.P. Lovecraft

What is a false idol? What you think love will get you. — Mari Perron

Objectivity is a false god, and the worship of this idol is particularly pernicious in disciplines like journalism and history. It is not possible to be objective
although of course it is possible to be honest. By pretending to attain to objectivity, a writer's fundamental faith commitments are not eliminated, but rather submerged
and they then come out in interesting and intellectually dishonest ways. — Douglas Wilson

One individual is his or her own best teacher, and no other idol or false image should be worshiped or adored because the God we are all seeking lies inside oneself, not outside. — Shirley Maclaine

Why was she always so craven, so apologetic? He had always seen Ruth as separate, good and untainted. As a child, his parents had appeared to him as starkly black and white, the one bad and frightening, the other good and kind. Yet as he had grown older, he kept coming up hard in his mind against Ruth's willing blindness, to her constant apologia for his father, to the unshakeable allegiance to her false idol. — J.K. Rowling

No wonder all the great comedians had such destructive private lives ... After you get the audience into that kind of frenzy, and you are being worshiped like the false idol you are, how do you leave the stage and transition back into real life? ... What is there left to do but set yourself on fire? — Margaret Cho

An illustration that does not complement a story, in the end, will become but a false idol. Since we cannot possibly believe in an absent story, we will naturally begin believing in the picture itself. — Orhan Pamuk

The confidence and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust be right, then is your god also true; and, on the other hand, if your trust be false and wrong, then you have not the true God; for these two belong together faith and God. That now, I say, upon which you set your heart and put your trust is properly your god. — Martin Luther

Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way. — Cormac McCarthy

The triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth. — Plato

Neuter discourse is a false idol. — Richard M. Weaver

A false image is, of course, a work of art, an idol. And a lie. A narcissist identifies with this image, not his true inner self. So, all he cares about is his image, not what kind of person he really is. Indeed, the latter has no real existence in his world.

In identifying with his image, he's identifying with an ephemeral figment that has but virtual reality, a purely immanent existence as a reflection in the attention shone on him by others. No attention, no image. No image, no self! — Kathy Krajco

That evening more firmly than ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and Hope a false idol - blind, bloodless, and of granite core. — Charlotte Bronte

Sometimes when I listen to people who say they have lost their faith, I am far less surprised than they expect. If their view of God is what they say, then it is only surprising that they did not reject it much earlier.
Other people have a concept of God so fundamentally false that it would be better for them to doubt than to remain devout. The more devout they are, the uglier their faith will become since it is based on a lie. Doubt in such a case is not only highly understandable, it is even a mark of spiritual and intellectual sensitivity to error, for their picture is not of God but an idol. — Os Guinness

People in Haiti eat dirt because it gives their starving bodies a false sense of satisfaction. But mud pies don't fill. They merely mask real hunger. [...] I saw the mud pies as a metaphor for the life of any Christian who has ever looked to something or someone other than God for fulfillment. — Jennifer Dukes Lee

An idol is something that we look to for things that only God can give. Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrine for their standing with God rather than on God himself and his grace. It is a subtly but deadly mistake. The sign that you have slipped into this form of self-justification is that you become what the book of Proverbs calls a 'scoffer'. — Timothy Keller