Idolatry Quotes

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott

“Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.”
― Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version

“You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated."

(Notebooks)”
― Voltaire

“When people say," I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself, "they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God's.”
― Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters

“The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre.Yourgod is a masked Death.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God, your functional savior.”
― Martin Luther

“Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.”
― Albert Einstein, Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace and the Bomb

“One must love God first, and only then can one love one's closest of kin and neighbors. We must not be idols to one another, for such is not the will of God.”
― Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives: The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

“Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.”
― Denis de Rougemont

“The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.”
― Esther Dyson

“What God says is best, indeed is best, though all men in the world are against it. Seeing, then, that God prefers his religion; seeing God prefers a tender conscience; seeing they that make themselves fools for the kingdom of heaven are wisest; and that the poor man that loveth Christ is richer than the greatest man in the world that hates him: Shame, depart, thou art an enemy to my salvation.”
― John Bunyan

“What are you really living for? It's crucial to realize that you either glorify God, or you glorify something or someone else. You're always making something look big. If you don't glorify God when you're involved in a conflict, you inevitably show that someone or something else rules your heart.”
― Ken Sande, Resolving Everyday Conflict

“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“Steam seems to have killed all gratitude in the hearts of sailors.”
― Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

“The vanity of intelligence is that the intelligent man is often more committed to 'one-upping' his opponent than being truthful. When the idea of intelligence, rather than intelligence itself, becomes a staple, there is no wisdom in it.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you've been holding on to more dearly than Him.”
― Tullian Tchivid gian, Jesus + Nothing = Everything

“Whatever controls us is our lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by acceptance. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord of our lives.”
― Rebecca Pippert, Out of the Saltshaker

“These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for an Omnipotent Being. How these madmen
give themselves away! The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall. But the God created from human vanity sees
no difference between an eagle and a sparrow.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Let temporal things be in the use, eternal things in the desire.”
― Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

“If you uproot the idol and fail to plant the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.”
― Tullian Tchivid gian, Jesus + Nothing = Everything

“I cursed myself. For once, heaven had sent me" Beauty "in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down... How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Mindset of the man too busy: I am too busy BEING God to become LIKE God.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God

“The Bible does not say money is the root of all evil; it says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. A poor man who, in his heart, worships the idea of being rich is more vulnerable to its evils than a rich man who has a heart to use it all for the Lord.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”
― Pope John Paul II