"Anthropomorphic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... that perform idolatrous practice in this country see nothing symbolic behind the image and take the whole show quite literally. And can anything be more degrading to an intelligent human being? We know that all religions are necessarily more or less anthropomorphic. But our popular Hinduism surpasses everything else in this respect, too. There is a famous shrine in this Presidency where the deity's chota hazri [early meal] begins with bread and butter, and he goes on eating without ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... life, or that they are at least closely related, seems to be indicated by the absence from the entire language of any general term for God. True, there are many beings in Zuni Mythology godlike in attributes, anthropomorphic, monstrous, and elemental, which are known as the "Finishers or makers of the paths of life," while the most superior of all is called the "Holder of the paths (of our lives)," Ha[']-no-o-na wi-la-po-na. Not only these gods, but all supernatural beings, ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... were changed into fishes". The idea is that "where a god dies, that is, ceases to exist in human form, his life passes into the waters where he is buried; and this again is merely a theory to bring the divine water or the divine fish into harmony with anthropomorphic ideas. The same thing was sometimes effected in another way by saying that the anthropomorphic deity was born from the water, as Aphrodite sprang from sea foam, or as Atargatis, in another form of the Euphrates legend, ... was ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... the 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 in the realms of non-rational ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... followed different lines of development, owing to the difference of dominant ideas in the races, and to the difference of social custom. Religion naturally played a foremost part in the art-evolution of both epochs. The anthropomorphic Greek mythology encouraged sculptors to concentrate their attention upon what Hegel called "the sensuous manifestation of the idea," while Greek habits rendered them familiar with the body frankly exhibited. Mediaeval religion withdrew Italian sculptors and painters ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... possible. Atonement is reversion to obedience. Now it was said above that the doctrine of the Unity did not reach Judaism as a philosophical truth exactly defined and apprehended. It came as the result of a long historic groping for the truth, and when it came it brought with it olden anthropomorphic wrappings and tribal adornments which were not easily to be discarded, if they ever were entirely discarded. So with the relation of God to man in general and Israel in particular. The unchangeable God is ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... manner of abominations in honour of the Demon (Venus). Here the Phrygian symbolism of Kybele and Attis (Atys) had become the Syrian Ba'al Tammuz and Astarte, and the Grecian Dionaea and Adonis, the anthropomorphic forms of the two greater lights. The site, Apheca, now Wady al-Afik on the route from Bayrut to the Cedars, is a glen of wild and wondrous beauty, fitting frame-work for the loves of goddess and demigod: and the ruins of the temple ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... 'The British Philistine has no knowledge of God. He believes that the Creator is a magnified non-natural man, living in the sky.' The Gippsland or Fuegian or Blackfoot Supreme Being is just a Being, anthropomorphic, not a mrart, or 'spirit.' The Supreme Being is a wesen, Being, Vui; we have hardly a term for an immortal existence so undefined. If the being is an idealised first ancestor (as among the Kurnai), he is not, on that account, ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... information to hand, he had formed in his mind an odd kind of anthropomorphic image of the germ. He pictured it as a squat, thick-set man of repellent aspect and stealthy movements, who sneaked up on you when you were not looking and did unpleasant things to you, selecting as the time for his attacks those nights when ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... raises two further objections; these, however, will not long detain us. We are informed in the first place that "the further progress of thought 'must force men hereafter to drop the higher anthropomorphic characters given to the First {80} Cause, as they have long since dropped the lower'"; but since our guide, a few pages later, quotes with approval the dictum that "unless we cease to think altogether, we must think anthropomorphically," we may be pardoned for declining to believe ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... evening—the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religion's opportunity—not the decorous religion of theologians, but anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort—not anyone pompous or tearful—were caring for us up in ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... 'Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is,' is a characteristic saying of a fellow-countryman of Behmen's. And Behmen's super-confessional and almost super-scriptural treatment of that frequent scriptural anthropomorphism,—'unavoidable and yet intolerable,'—the wrath of GOD, must be left by me in Behmen's own bold pages. ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... 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 was referred which could not be accounted ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... the infinite marvels and mysteries of nature. It is admitted that a man may believe in God without being superstitious; it is much truer that he may be "superstitious" (whatever that means) without believing that there is an anthropomorphic bon Dieu. However this may be, Mr. Solomon made me reflect often and deeply for many a long year, until I arrived to ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... to reveal 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, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the All Father, or that belief in a decadent condition of survival. This is quite certain; for, whereas the Arunta laugh at all inquiries as to what went before the 'Alcheringa,' or mythic age of evolution, the Kaitish, according to Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, aver that an anthropomorphic being, who dwells above the sky, and is named Atnatu, first created himself, and then 'made the Alcheringa,'—the mythic age of primal evolution. Of mankind, some, in Kaitish opinion, were evolved; of others Atnatu is the father. He ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... as an orthodox theologian was seriously attacked, as well as the whole tendency for which he stood. The result was a wide-spread condemnation of the spiritualizing teaching of the great Alexandrian, and the rise of what might be called an anthropomorphic traditionalism. The first of the three controversies took place in Palestine, 395-399, and was occasioned by Epiphanius of Salamis, a zealous opponent of heresy. He denounced Origen and induced Jerome to abandon Origen; and Rufinus ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... of Jerusalem, the scholar with Athens; or that the man of action—be he the first French republican or the latest imperialist—most frankly draws his inspiration from the corresponding developments of Paris. It is a commonplace of psychology that our thought is and must be anthropomorphic; a commonplace of history that it has been Hebraomorphic, Hellenomorphic, Latinomorphic, and ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... 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 ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... McLennan sets out, that totem-worship preceded the worship of anthropomorphic gods, is one to which I can yield but a qualified assent. It is true in a sense, but not wholly true. If the words "gods" and "worship" carry with them their ordinary definite meanings, the statement is true; but if their meanings are widened so as to ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Prof. Cheyne (Encyclopaedia Biblica, col. 411) says, there was an ancient North Semitic myth to explain it. The event was afterwards localized in Babylon. The myth, as it appears in Genesis, is quite polytheistic and anthropomorphic. According to Cornelius Alexander (frag. 10) and Abydenus (frags. 5 and 6) the tower was overthrown by the winds; according to Yaqut (i. 448 f.) and the Lisan el-'Arab (xiii. 72) mankind were swept together by winds into the plain afterwards called ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... without distinction equally well to the natives in the interior of Borneo, to the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula, and to the now extinct aborigines of Tasmania. According to Virchow their dance is demon worship of a purely anthropomorphic character; no musical instrument of any kind was known to them. Even the simple expression of emotions by the voice, which we have seen is its most primitive medium, has not been replaced to any extent among these races since ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... mythic ancestors are worshipped as divine. This superstition is called Totemism, and the mythic ancestor is known as the Totem. As a people passes gradually into a higher stage of culture, greater stress is constantly laid on the human qualities of the Totem, until it becomes at length an anthropomorphic god. To such deity the object previously reverenced as a Totem is attached, and a new and modified legend grows up to account ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland |
