A Quote by Zora Neale Hurston
All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.
Related Quotes
Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear, and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom.
where are the gods the gods hate us the gods have run away the gods have hidden in holes the gods are dead of the plague they rot and stink too there never were any gods there’s only death
There are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance. "They are aware of us, they fear us, and they hate us," said Odin. "You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise.
The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.
It is precisely that requirement of shared worship that has been the principal source of suffering for individual man and the human race since the beginning of history. In their efforts to impose universal worship, men have unsheathed their swords and killed one another. They have invented gods and challenged each other: "Discard your gods and worship mine or I will destroy both your gods and you!"
Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-
Fear is the mother of all gods ... Nature does all things spontaneously, by herself, without the meddling of the gods.
Gods are called many by the error of some who worshipped many deities, thinking as they did the planets and other stars were gods, and also the separate parts of the world.
The thing about playing gods, whether you're playing Thor and Loki or Greco Roman gods or Indian gods or characters in any mythology, the reason that gods were invented was because they were basically larger versions of ourselves.
They're Lares. House gods." "House gods," Percy said. "Like...smaller than real gods, but larger than apartment gods?
An irreligious man is not one who denies the gods of the majority, but one who applies to the gods the opinions of the majority. For what most men say about the gods are not ideas derived from sensation, but false opinions, according to which the greatest evils come to the wicked, and the greatest blessings come to the good from the gods.
There are many gods . . . gods of beauty and magic, gods of the garden, gods in our own backyards, but we go off to foreign countries to find new ones, we reach to the stars to find new ones--. . . . The god of the church is a jealous god; he cannot live in peace with other gods.
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before; though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left God not for gods, they say, but for no gods; and this has never happened before. That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, and the money, and power, and what they call life, or race, or dialect.The church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms upturned in an age which advances progressively backwards?
We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.
Sadly enough, my young friends, it is a characteristic of our age that if people want any gods at all, they want them to be gods who do not demand much, comfortable gods, smooth gods who not only don't rock the boat but don't even row it, gods who pat us on the head, make us giggle, then tell us to run along and pick marigolds.
The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth's service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. "The truth" outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods; it is Deity itself.
Related Authors
Alan Bennett Quotes
English
Dramatist
Alexandre Dumas Quotes
French
Dramatist
Anton Chekhov Quotes
Russian
Dramatist
David Mamet Quotes
American
Dramatist
Edward Albee Quotes
American
Dramatist
Eugene Ionesco Quotes
French
Dramatist
Friedrich Schiller Quotes
German
Dramatist
Harold Pinter Quotes
English
Dramatist
Jean Racine Quotes
French
Dramatist
John Heywood Quotes
English
Dramatist
Jules Renard Quotes
French
Dramatist
Lillian Hellman Quotes
American
Dramatist
Pierre Corneille Quotes
French
Dramatist
Tennessee Williams Quotes
American
Dramatist
Tom Stoppard Quotes
English
Dramatist
W. S. Gilbert Quotes
English
Dramatist