Idols Quotes

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
― David Foster Wallace , This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."

(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Constantly exposing yourself to popular culture and the mass media will ultimately shape your reality tunnel in ways that are not necessarily conducive to achieving your Soul Purpose and Life Calling. Modern society has generally ‘lost the plot’. Slavishly following its false gods and idols makes no sense in a spiritually aware life.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“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

“Be careful who you choose as your hero or who you choose to deify, be it Clay Aiken or Barack Obama. You put all you're hope and all your dreams and all your ideas about stuff into one human being. They're a human being they're going to let you down.

You can't make someone your hero because of something you read on the internet. The internet is not a source of information it is a source of disinformation.”
― Craig Ferguson

“Beware of any work for God that causes or allows you to avoid concentrating on Him. A great number of Christian workers worship their work. The only concern of Christian workers should be their concentration on God. This will mean that all the other boundaries of life, whether they are mental, moral, or spiritual limits, are completely free with the freedom God gives His child; that is, a worshiping child, not a wayward one. A worker who lacks this serious controlling emphasis of concentration on God is apt to become overly burdened by his work. He is a slave to his own limits, having no freedom of his body, mind, or spirit. Consequently, he becomes burned out and defeated. There is no freedom and no delight in life at all. His nerves, mind, and heart are so overwhelmed that God’s blessing cannot rest on him.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

“But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously — after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)”
― Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset

“We must overturn so many idols, the idol of self first of all, so that we can be humble, and only from our humility can learn to be redeemers, can learn to work together in the way the world really needs. Liberation that raises a cry against others is no true liberation. Liberation that means revolutions of hate and violence and takes away lives of others or abases the dignity of others cannot be true liberty. True liberty does violence to self and, like Christ, who disregarded that he was sovereign becomes a slave to serve others.”
― Oscar A. Romero, The Violence Of Love

“Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.”
― Bede Griffiths

“We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Hereos. Idols. They're never who you think they are. Shorter. Nastier. Smellier. And when you finally meet them, there's something that makes you want to choke the shit out of them.”
― Paul Beatty, Slumberland

“What first truly stirred my soul was not fear or pain, nor was it pleasure or games; it was the yearning for freedom. I had to gain freedom - but from what, from whom? Little by little, in the course of time, I mounted freedom's rough unaccommodating ascent. To gain freedom first of all from the Turk, that was the initial step; after that, later, this new struggle began: to gain freedom from the inner Turk - from ignorance, malice and envy, from fear and laziness, from dazzling false ideas; and finally from idols, all of them, even the most revered and beloved.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

“There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“One very difficult aspect of sin is that my sin never feels like sin to me. My sin feels like life to me, plain and simple. My heart is an idol factory, and my mind is an excuse-making factory.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

“The youngest, aged twelve, could not conceal her disappointment, and turned away, feeling as so many of us have felt when we discover that our idols are very extraordinary men and women.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys

“it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.”
― Nietzsche, Friedrich

“Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“A god is anything that lives outside of God.”
― Anthony Liccione

“We do remember once we were wrong sacrificing everything for idols and stones likewise today for ghost and phantoms.”
― M.F. Moonzajer

“...we can't admit we're not God until we look up and see God - in all his glory, in all his otherworldliness, in all his holiness, his set-apartness.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“Idols are both material and nonmaterial forms. They are anything that becomes a God to us. The breaking of idols is not a dream breaker. It is a fear breaker. Getting rid of them is not to create pain. It is to take away pain. The spiritual path doesn’t annihilate the source of our happiness. It gives us the possibility of real happiness.”
― Donna Goddard, Geboor: Spiritual Fiction

“Sports, after all, are in competition with religion for any given fan’s devotion. And baseball has a devoted following, like a flock of worshipers, each with their own gods and idols.”
― Chris Baldwin, Stand on the Bench, Achilles

“The effort to be the god that we are not has led to the kind of world that we wish were not.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I remember that [my brother's] first question concerned the centuries-old Buddha statues that were dynamited by the Taliban in March of that year, shortly before our encounter. Two Taliban combatants from Kandahar confidently responded that worshiping anything outside of Islam was unacceptable and that therefore these statues had to be destroyed. My brother looked at them and said, this time in Pashto, "There are still many sun- worshippers in this country. Will you also try to get rid of the sun and drop darkness over the Earth?”
― Yahya Massoud

“The professional iconoclast is such either
because he does not understand the nature of images and rites, or because he does not trust the understanding of those who practice iconolatory or follow rites. call the other man an idolater or superstitious is, generally speaking, only a manner of asserting our own superiority.
Idolatry is the misuse of symbols, a definition needing no further qualifications. The traditional philosophy has nothing to say against the use of symbols and rites ; though there is much that the most orthodox can have to say against their misuse. It may be emphasized that the danger of treating verbal formulae as absolutes is generally greater than that of misusing plastic images.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian & Oriental Philosophy of Art Formerly: "Why Exhibit Works of Art?"

“The paths your idols took closed behind them and you'll have to grope around in the weeds, trying to cut your own way through.”
― Yvonne Woon, If You, Then Me

“Eros, honoured without reservation and obeyed unconditionally, becomes a demon. And this is just how he claims to be honoured and obeyed. Divinely indifferent to our selfishness, he is also demoniacally rebellious to every claim of God or Man that would oppose him. Hence as the poet says:

People in love cannot be moved by kindness,
And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.

Martyrs is exactly right. Years ago when I wrote about medieval love-poetry and described its strange, half makebelieve, "religion of love", I was blind enough to treat this as an almost purely literary phenomenon. I know better now. Eros by his nature invites it. Of all loves he is, at his height, most god-like; therefore most prone to demand our worship. Of himself he always tends to turn "being in love" into a sort of religion.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The god that we need to be in denial of is the one that we purport to be.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“There's something very human about admiration, noticing good qualities in others and trying to embody them. We need our heroes, they inspire, teach and motivate and they’re often the only ones who can cut through the noise.”
― Rebecca Ryder, The Dream To End All Dreams

“The existence of God is evidenced by our need of a God, but our inability to be one.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough