"Anthropomorphic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Father, generally pray only to the God whom He revealed, and cherish the memory of Jesus with no other feelings than supreme gratitude and veneration. Those, lastly, who worship in God only the Great Unknown who makes for righteousness, find myths and anthropomorphic symbols merely disturbing in such devotions as they are still able to practise. In dealing with convinced Voluntarists it is perhaps not disrespectful to suggest that the difficult position in which they find themselves has produced a peculiar activity of the will, such as is seldom found ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... matter of faith, not of reason. With regard to the anthropomorphism of the Hebrew story, that is shared, and must be shared, by all religions—that is, all religious which rest upon the notion of a personal God. The limitations of man's nature, the limitations of language, make anthropomorphic metaphor necessary when a man speaks of a god. Even the evolutionists cannot get rid ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... and now known as the Odes. From these Odes it is abundantly clear that the Chinese people continued to hold, more clearly and more firmly than ever, a deep-seated belief in the existence of an anthropomorphic and personal God, whose one care was the welfare of the ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... peremptorily as that of the Iliad or the Eddas. And the abandonment of the masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy seemed a necessary and logical consequence of the long abandonment by thinkers of the anthropomorphic conception of the same. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... various ways in which various minds function, is the fact that when in these days we seek to visualize, in some pictorial manner, our ultimate view of life, the images which are called up are geometrical or chemical rather than anthropomorphic. It is probable that even the most rational and logical among us as soon as he begins to philosophize at all is compelled by the necessity of things to form in the mind some vague pictorial representation answering to his conception ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... us commune with one another. [The speaker is desirous of communing with his favorite man/id[-o]s, with whom he considers himself on an equality, as is indicated by the anthropomorphic form of one between whom and himself the ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... of God as essentially anthropomorphic. Indeed, whether in good faith or for the sake of effect, he brings forward the old difficulties which have been answered ad nauseam with an air of freshness, as though unearthed for the first time, and therefore as setting religion in new and unheard-of straits. So, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... but the Trinity personifying the cosmic powers of the universe as Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer, became publicly known in some irregular manner in the Turanian days. This idea was still further materialized and degraded by the Semites into a strictly anthropomorphic Trinity consisting of ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... manner, the ultimate development of myth. No one is likely to confound a Homeric myth with a myth from the Edda, nor either with a myth from a Brahmana, though in all three cases the substance, the original set of ideas, may be much the same. In all three you have anthropomorphic gods, capable of assuming animal shapes, tricky, capricious, limited in many undivine ways, yet endowed with magical powers. So far the mythical gods of Homer, of the Edda, of any of the Brahmanas, are on a level with each other, and not much above the gods of savage mythology. This ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... imagination will also be awake and active at five. He will look out on the world with anthropomorphic (or rather with paedomorphic) eyes. He will be living on a great flat earth—unless some officious person has tried to muddle his wits by telling him the earth is round; amidst trees, animals, men, houses, engines, utensils, that are ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... amount to a conviction) that there was an Unknown (or even, as many thought, an Unknowable) Divinity of some sort, which might account for the phenomena of the world, and which might be the truth behind the vagaries of the anthropomorphic polytheism, was as far as Greek thought had led men at the period with which we have to do. Their {theos} was really nothing more than Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable,"—a mysterious "force," to which everything ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... that reflects our anthropomorphic ideas of God more strongly than the fact that no revelation of prophets has ever conceived of the Supreme Deity as other than masculine; and no doubt the Mariolatry of the Church of Rome is the reflection of the growing influence in ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... though certainly the cause of more evils than malice can devise, is less employable as a villain: it is not anthropomorphic enough for melodrama. Mr. Sinclair is moral first and then intellectual. Touching upon such a theme as the horrors of venereal disease he feels more than a rational man's contempt for the imbecility of parents who will not instruct their ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... connection with modern conceptions of religion. In the main it is actually antagonistic to them. Two contradictory codes have been circulated under one cover, and the result is dire confusion. The one is a scheme depending upon a special tribal God, intensely anthropomorphic and filled with rage, jealousy and revenge. The conception pervades every book of the Old Testament. Even in the psalms, which are perhaps the most spiritual and beautiful section, the psalmist, amid much that is noble, sings of the ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the people generally. But the materialism of the masses is not so degenerating and destructive as the impossible dogmas entertained by your numerous sects WHO HAVE MADE GOD, WHO IS INFINITE LOVE, AN ANTHROPOMORPHIC MONSTER. These dogmas are priestly inventions created to frighten God's children; to make of man, created after the image of God a crawling, servile creature, instead of what he really should be, the highest manifestation of the Divine, the ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... the Divine Spirit of Reason, within man, prompting each and all to act righteously and equitably one toward the other. Yet he is decidedly less mystical. He lays emphasis on the necessity to study the works of God rather than the Word of God; and has evidently become less anthropomorphic and more spiritual, less mystical and more rational, less religious and more ethical, less theological and more philosophic, less scholastic and more scientific. However, we had better let him speak for himself. Immediately after his reflections on the duties and ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... cost of so much pain, and which was the inner centre round which my life revolved for twelve years, may perhaps show that the Atheistic Philosophy is misjudged sorely when it is scouted as vile or condemned as intellectually degraded. It has outgrown anthropomorphic deities, and it leaves us face to face with Nature, open to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations. "There is only one kind of prayer," it says, "which is reasonable, and that is the deep, silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around us, as revealed ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... The anthropomorphic conception of God, our Martian finds, is now denied by most cultured theists; nevertheless, they still maintain a belief in a deity endowed with consciousness. Professor H. N. Wieman states that, "God is superhuman, but not ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... various birds. More advanced peoples regard powerful animals as gods in disguise (such are certain Mexican divinities). Later, all trace of animal worship disappears, and the character of the myth is purely anthropomorphic.[57] Kuehn, in a special work, has shown how the successive stages of social evolution express themselves in the successive stages of mythology—myths of cannibals, of hunters, of herders, land-tillers, sailors. Speaking of pure savagery, Max Mueller[58] ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot |
