Modern Idolatry Quotes & Sayings

The apprenticeship to passivity - I know nothing more contrary to our habits. (The modern age begins with two hysterics: Don Quixote and Luther.) If we make time, produce and elaborate it, we do so out of our repugnance to the hegemony of essence and to the contemplative submission it presupposes. Taoism seems to me wisdom's first and last word: yet I resist it, my instincts reject it, as they refuse to endure anything - the heredity of revolt is too much for us. Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming. What recourse to China or India will heal us? — Emil Cioran

When Douglas walked, his mind ran, when he ran, his mind walked. — Ray Bradbury

The system of idolatry, invented by modern christianity, far surpasses in absurdity anything that we have ever heard of. — Orson Pratt

If I see a roll of Bubble Tape, a bag of Haribo Gold-Bears or a pouch of green-apple Big League Chew, I'm eleven again. — Rosecrans Baldwin

God withdrew from the temple in Ezekiel's day because He would not and could not dwell together with idolatry, immorality, and violence. The principle will never change - the Lamb will not be married to someone who remains wedded to his sins, in spite of what some modern teachers claim. — Michael L. Brown

The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners. — Natalie Clifford Barney

Deep down inside, don't we at least suspect we are really made for shared relationship and not competitive acquisition? I think we do know this. But we're thrown into a modern world where identity and purpose are almost entirely based in a ruthless contest for status and stuff. Without a primary orientation of the soul toward God, life gets reduced to the pursuit of power and the acquisition of things. Attempting to yoke God to that kind of agenda is what the Bible calls idolatry - God harnessed as means, the holy reduced to utility. — Brian Zahnd

If ever I address you with an intimacy, you'll know it. — Courtney Milan

Just set one day's work in front of the last day's work. That's the way it comes out. And that's the only way it does. — John Steinbeck

It brings me back to reality. The combine doesn't care if you're a senator or not. It breaks down whenever it wants to break down. — Jon Tester

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy, or charms, can make us sleep as well, And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then? — John Donne

If she's a psychology student, she'll love talking about herself. — Graeme Simsion

From New Hampshire forward, for reasons that absolutely mystified me, the press thought the most important issue in the race was the middle class tax cut. I never did meet any voter who thought that. — William J. Clinton

In reality, the pioneers of this transformation of the indigenous Zapatista woman are a merit of the women insurgents. — Subcomandante Marcos

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing! — Charles Lamb

Christians recognize that all social organizations exist as parodies of eschatological hope. And so it is that the city is a poor imitation of heavenly community;13 the modern state, a deformed version of the ecclesia;14 the market, a distortion of consummation; modern entertainment, a caricature of joy; schooling, a misrepresentation of true formation; liberalism, a crass simulacrum of freedom; and the sovereignty we accord to the self, a parody of God himself. As these institutions and ideals become ends in themselves, they become the objects of idolatry. The shalom of God - which is to say, the presence of God himself - is the antithesis to all such imitations. — James Davison Hunter

All of the modern counseling vernacular is really not dealing with the root issue of idolatry. Someone or something's preeminent rather than God. — Mark Driscoll

I like to think I'm a bit smarter than I sometimes let on. — Jack Whitehall