Idolatry Quotes

It is also the irrational instinct of religionism, the vague yearning for something to worship—a reflection or shadow of the true devotional principle—which prompts men to project a subjective image of the lower, personal mind, and to endow it with human attributes, and then to claim to receive "revelations" from it; and this—the image of the Beast, or unspiritual mind,—is their anthropomorphic God, a fabulous monster the worship of which has ever prompted men to fanaticism and persecution, and has inflicted untold misery and dread upon the masses of mankind, as well as physical torture and death in hideous forms upon the many martyrs who have refused to bend the knee to this Gorgonean phantom of the beast-mind of man. Truly, where the worshipers of this image of the Beast predominate, the man whose brow and hand are unbranded by this superstition, who neither thinks nor acts in accordance with it, suffers ostracism if not virulent persecution.

James Morgan Pryse

Since chess was such a painful test of intellect, it affected his emotions too much to be sport.

Paul C. Nagel

Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.

Sherry Turkle

I am blind to the very things that make for our own peace.

Oswald Chambers

Where do people...and why do people...have to wait, and what tends to happen when they do? So far, I have one observation to offer. It seems that waiting is a crucible. It tests us. It's when God's people have to wait that they get in trouble. The alternative to waiting for God is idolatry.

Marcia Lebhar

I was assigned to the office of a recently deceased faculty member; the office hadn't been cleaned out yet, and a few days before the fall term began, I unlocked the door to find a dirty room whose bookshelves were crammed with empty bourbon bottles and crucifixes, mute testimony to the limits of literature as a sustaining comfort in life.

Maureen Corrigan

One writer may speak of something more lasting than Horace Greeley when he writes of that editor that his secular philanthropy drifted into autocratic ambition.

Harold Holzer

We call bad one who rejects the fruit he is given for the fruit he is expecting or the fruit he was given last time.

C.S. Lewis

Ice hockey is the closest thing to religion permitted by the Soviet Union.

Tom Clancy

As all the rivers run into the sea, so all delights centre in our Beloved.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Left to our own devices, we will make God in our own image.

Jared Brock

While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is the best.

C.S. Lewis

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

The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce.

H.W. Brands

God is not against you owning things, but he is against the things owning you.

Orrin Woodward

Shopkeepers —the great landed and commercial interests—regularly sat and slept, and where the two publicans occupied pews, but seldom made even the pretence of worshipping.

Thomas Hughes

This work of making trade righteous, of Christianizing trade, looks like the very hardest the Gospel has ever had to take in hand—in England at any rate.

Thomas Hughes

He wants you for parts.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

We view God as a resource that will broker all my cheap desires.

Jon Hauser

If we would remember that all the trees of earth are marked for the woodman's axe, we should not be so ready to build our nests in them.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Get out of this office! I'll have no feelings here.

Charles Dickens

He fetishized limits.

Rick Perlstein

Gold, or at least the prospect of it, saved him, then killed him.

H.W. Brands

Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.

Sherry Turkle

The minute you hear a sermon on materialism, you're glad somebody else is there to hear it.

Paul David Tripp

The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.

Daniel Yergin

We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Not even generals can stop the rain.

Jeff Shaara

Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating "compulsive media" to get you to click things more.

Eli Pariser

Propositions are true or false. Images are not.

Gene Edward Veith Jr.

A god that can be reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God that can be worshiped.

Alister E. McGrath

We often forget how thirsty we are because we believe we will fulfill our dreams.

Timothy J. Keller

Idolatry involves putting the things we love in the place of God or seeing God as a means of getting the things that we want, and that's the second great struggle of our lives.

Colin S. Smith

For him (LBJ) food was not an indulgence but and intoxicant, an object he reached for to fill a gaping void, one he could never fill up.

Jonathan Darman

When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.

H.W. Brands

Be my God, so I can just be me.

Laura Story

Admirations are never paid in any way, try to make yourself of what you admire, and it will pay you with originality.

Auliq-Ice

I had taken up my quill to begin writing many times before now, but I always abandoned it quickly: each time I was overcome with fear. Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons—and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them: they run off—and how will you ever get control of them again! They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper—black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and implore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind.

Nikos Kazantzakis

To use good things to our own ends is always a false religion

Richard J. Foster

Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of human rage, with these out hells and our heavens, so few inches apart, we must be awfully small, and not as strong as we think we are.

Rich Mullins

Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God, your functional savior.

Martin Luther

Sensual and spiritual are not easy words to use; that there are, perhaps, not twoAphrodites, but one Aphrodite with a Janus face.

E.M. Forster

Although we should affirm the wonder and mystery of sexual intimacy and romantic attraction as God's good creations, we need to set these aesthetic enjoyments within the context of the Christian virtues of fidelity, self-sacrifice, and patience in suffering.Bringing this together, our pastoral approach should be double-edged, seeking to challenge our culture's worship of sexual desire and personal fulfillment while offering a different vision of human flourishing. Christian formative involves both RESISTANCE and REDIRECTION. But is is the redirection of our desires that enables our resistance of cultural idolatries. Failure to attend to the dynamics of our desires leads to inevitable self-deception regarding the 'freedom' of our actions. Especially within our sexual lives, our hearts must be truly captivated by the goodness of the Christian vision of life, so that our whole self is drawn toward it, or our commitment to live in tune with it will be brittle.

Jonathan Grant

In games, he feels that he is "creating something new." But this is creation where someone has already been. It is not creation but the FEELING of creation. These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real world cannot provide.

Sherry Turkle

For him, mastery of the game world is a source of joy.

Sherry Turkle

If you uproot the idol and fail to plant the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.

Tullian Tchividjian

You can either be god of certain areas of your life, or let Me be God of your whole life.

The Skit Guys

The narrator refers to a character as "an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.

Pearl S. Buck

When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.

Sherry Turkle

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out air-quality. He knew it already. It was I who did. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the day all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize that fact was to knock it down.

C.S. Lewis

He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.

Philip Zaleski

By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of the church community, we form, and shape, and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real world, flesh and blood, face-to-face relationships?

Tim Challies

As history shows, dead metaphors make good idols.

Elizabeth A. Johnson

About the time I told God that He didn't exist, I was desperate for an identity.

Donald Miller

The more we listen to the voices of others, voices unlike our own, the more we remain open to the transcendent forces that save us from idolatry. The more we listen to ourselves, the more we create God in our own image until God becomes a tawdry idol that looks and speaks like us. The power of the commandments is found not in the writings of theologians, although I read and admire some, but in the pathos of human life, including lives that are very unlike our own. All states and nations work to pervert religions into civic religions, ones where the goals of the state become the goals of the divine. This is increasingly true in the United States. But once we believe we understand the will of God and can act as agents of God we become dangerous, a menace to others and a menace to ourselves. We forget that we do not understand. We forget to listen.

Chris Hedges

Whatever good, true, or perfect things we can say about humanity or creation, we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power.

Richard Rohr

Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day.

John Piper

To cleave wood is a common every-day business, and yet it has its dangers; so then, reader, there are dangers connected with your calling and daily life which it will be well for you to be aware of. Your occupation may be as humble as log splitting, and yet the devil can tempt you in it. Nowhere is he safe who thinks himself so.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Sam Rayburn on LBJ's recuperation from his heart attack: "It would kill him if he relaxed.

Robert A. Caro

Technology is the idol of our age. The Bible describes the evils of worshipping things built by the hand of man. Back then, it was a simple statue, today it is far more insidious. And for every problem technology creates, we look to technology for solutions.

James Rozoff

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Idolatry Quotes

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