"Deity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sentiment was to return thanks to heaven for being on the borders of the sea. I saw waving on the Neva the English flag, the symbol of liberty, and I felt that on committing myself to the ocean, I might return under the immediate power of the Deity; it is an illusion which one cannot help entertaining, to believe one's self more under the hand of Providence, when delivered to the elements than when depending on men, and especially on that man who appears to be a revelation of the evil ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... certain of their actions made an event in our day. It became a serious matter of conjecture as to whether Madame de Tours, the social swell of the town, would or would not offer up her prayer to Deity, accompanied by Friponne, her black poodle. If Friponne issued forth from the narrow door, in company with her austere mistress, the shining black silk gown, we knew, would not decorate the angular frame of this aristocratic provincial; a sober beige was ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... son's position. Nothing appears more unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's way of thought. The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the conception of formless force. A personal deity was a necessary character in the drama, as he conceived it. And his morality, though (or inasmuch as) it dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative lawlessness, was, as he often insisted, very much akin to the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... is in connection with the cult of the obscene deity to whom these wretched creatures paid their scandalous vows that my most awful memories seem to have been associated. It may have been—I hope it was, a mirage born of my half delirious state, but it seemed to me that they ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... Time's fountain and head, Whose shadows to hours and minutes creep, As into their fold the gathering sheep. The Alps, in their garb of eternal snow— So far from the world they grow white with dread— The moment know When from the East's ever darkening sea He will rise—the image of Deity. And the birds, the same moment awaking, blow The world's great trumpet that men may know That night hath fled, And day is ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... of modern education is calculated to turn out a good, fairish, commonplace article; but the formula for a genius remains a secret with Deity. The great man becomes great in spite of teachers and parents: and his near kinsmen, being color-blind, usually pooh-pooh the idea that he is anything more than mediocre. At Oxford, William Morris fell in with a young man of about his own age, by the name of Edward Burne-Jones. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... because his will must of necessity be in accordance with the fitting and right. Could we conceive of Omnipotence commanding what is intrinsically unfit and wrong, the virtuous man would not be the God-server, but the Prometheus suffering the implacable vengeance of an unrighteous Deity. 3. Though everlasting happiness be the result of virtue, it is not the ground or the reason for it. Were our being earth-limited, virtue would lose none of its obligation. Epictetus led as virtuous a life as if heaven had been open to his faith and hope.—Paley's system may be ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... was marked, on the side of Madame St. Aubert, by patient suffering, and subjected wishes. The composure, with which she awaited her death, could be derived only from the retrospect of a life governed, as far as human frailty permits, by a consciousness of being always in the presence of the Deity, and by the hope of a higher world. But her piety could not entirely subdue the grief of parting from those whom she so dearly loved. During these her last hours, she conversed much with St. Aubert and Emily, on the prospect ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... enlightenment—and to acquire for ourselves the possession and enjoyment of that elevated refinement which so much adorns and beautifies social intercourse among mankind, and leads them to a proper appreciation of the relations existing between man and Deity—man and his fellow men, and man and that companion whom God has bestowed upon him, to console him in the hours of trouble and darkness, or enjoy with him the blessings that heaven vouchsafed occasionally to shower upon our ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... be rationalized into thin allegory. Nothing was left possessed of any vitality but a bare skeleton of abstract theology, dependent upon argument instead of tradition, and which might use or might dispense with a Christian phraseology. Its deity was not a historical personage, but the name of a metaphysical conception. For a revelation was substituted a demonstration. To vindicate Providence meant no longer to stimulate imagination by pure and sublime rendering of accepted truths, but to solve ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... upon it afterward. His every movement is perfectly easy, and he gesticulates much, equally well with either arm. Nothing could be more beautiful in its way than the sweep of his right hand, as it was raised to Heaven, when he spoke of the Deity—nothing sweeter than the smile which at times mantles his face. His voice is not very loud, but it was heard distinctly through the large pavilion. On the whole our previous impression was perfectly confirmed ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the reader happen to be competent to form an opinion on that phase of the matter—he will generally find that the art dwindles in direct proportion as the moralized deity expatiates; in fact, that they are incompatible. And he will also confess (if he have the courage of his opinions) that, as between moralized deity and true art, his choice is heartily and unreservedly for ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... might be the consequences of so mysterious an asking, the dark crowd with drew to a little distance, and silently watched the progress of the destruction. They had heard strange sayings of the power of the Deity of their invaders, and as their victims appeared suddenly to cease using any of the known means of safety, they appeared to expect, perhaps they did expect, some unequivocal manifestation of the power of the Great Spirit of ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... voyages, and it is known that the Indians had quite a passion for hunting the whale, or powdawe as they called it. The Montauk Indians regarded the fin or tail of a whale as a rare sacrifice to their deity. As the early settlers began to spread throughout New England, it became quite an industry along the sea-shore to hunt stranded whales for their oil and blubber. This naturally led to hunting them in their native element, and the industry extended along Cape Cod and Long Island, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... a fellow-student should stab and throw him into the water, or that, as he was reeling home at midnight, the treacherous divinity of the bowl should have handed him over to the embrace of his brother deity of the river. Why then should even his imagination fix upon me as the source of the injury? Gentlemen, a foolish attachment to the customs of a long line of ancestors has led me into what I find for the first time to be a dangerous habit—that of wearing arms;—dangerous, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... every sect but every individual modifies the general attributes of the Deity towards assimilation with his own character: the just man dwells on the justice, the stern upon the wrath; the attributes that do not please the worshipper he insensibly forgets. Wherefore, O my pupils, you will not smile when you read in Barnes that the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... custom to think that the government was the only source of honor; it is still looked upon as the source of the highest honor. By barbarians the monarch is deified. In many civilized countries of our own time kings are said to rule by special favor of the Deity; no one stands erect, no loud word is spoken in their presence; and, indeed, everywhere they are approached with a reverence so great that more could hardly be shown to God himself. This homage is not given on account of eminent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... and commends itself greatly to my erstwhile mind, but is much like saying, "Jump off the Brooklyn bridge, "slowly." ... I am not resigned, of course. Because I cannot see the end. Definiteness is so imperative to some natures. However, I think that I have done all that an exacting Deity would demand, and cannot be accused of suicide, if things ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... souls and bodies, eternally to enjoy divine glory in the presence of the Supreme Being. He alleges that the Jews alone preserve the doctrine of the unity of God. Yet their God would be deemed a very indifferent man with us: and it was to correct their anamorphosis of the Deity, that Jesus preached, as well as to establish the doctrine of a future state. However, Levi insists, that that was taught in the Old Testament, and even by Moses himself and the prophets. He agrees that an anointed prince was prophesied and promised: but denies that the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... not be interested in a man who says he can destroy half the world if he wants to! He assumes to be a sort of deity, you know!—Jove and his thunderbolts in the shape of a man in a badly cut suit of modern clothes! Isn't it fun!" She gave a little peal of laughter. "And every one in the room to-night thinks I am ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... Not a victim bled, not a prayer was offered, when thou didst embark on this voyage. Go back to Egypt, to the holy waters of Nile, and there pay thy vows, and offer a great sacrifice to their offended deity; thus, and thus only, canst thou win thy return to thine own country and ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... seen that the deeper problems of religion—the deity of Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul—were not yet brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first terrible earthquake, and the ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... shrubs, ever-ripe fruit, and ever-lovely virgins. What these happy persons took for reality was but a dream; but it was a dream so soft, so voluptuous, so enthralling, that they sold themselves body and soul to him who gave it to them, and obedient to his orders as to those of a deity, struck down the designated victim, died in torture without a murmur, believing that the death they underwent was but a quick transition to that life of delights of which the holy herb, now before you, had given ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... an article on the subject in the Dundee Evening Telegraph, Mr. Robertson observes: "If our finite minds were more capable of comprehension, what a glorious view of the grandeur of the Deity would be displayed to us in the contemplation of the centre and source of light and heat to the solar system. The force requisite to pour such continuous floods to the remotest parts of the system must ever baffle the mind of man to grasp. ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... well known that during the French Revolution religion was dethroned, and reason installed in the place of Deity. The spreading of such doctrines was by many ascribed to the 'Illuminati,' who were supposed to be Masons. During this period clubs like the Jacobin Clubs in France were formed in this country, and the spread of these doctrines was greatly feared, ...
— Washington's Masonic Correspondence - As Found among the Washington Papers in the Library of Congress • Julius F. Sachse
... shores. He will, moreover, at thy suit declare, Thou favour'd of the skies! what good, what ill Hath in thine house befall'n, while absent thou Thy voyage difficult perform'st and long. 480 She spake, and I replied—Thyself reveal By what effectual bands I may secure The antient Deity marine, lest, warn'd Of my approach, he shun me and escape. Hard task for mortal hands to bind a God! Then thus Idothea answer'd all-divine. I will inform thee true. Soon as the sun Hath climb'd the middle heav'ns, the prophet old, Emerging while the breezy ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... otherwise is known of him. (6) "Hawart" is perhaps identical with the Saxon duke Hadugot, who is reputed to have played an important part in the conquest of Thuringia. He evidently comes from the Low German version. (7) "Iring" is considered by Wilmanns to have been originally an ancient deity, as the Milky Way is called "Iringe straze" or "Iringi". He occurs in a legend of the fall of the Thuringian kingdom, where he played such a prominent role that the Milky Way was named after him. See W. Grimm, "Heldensage", p. 394, who thinks, however, that the connection of Iring with the ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... the chapel of his palace at Neustadt, in such a position that the officiating priest should ever trample over his head and heart. The king expressed the hope that this humiliation of his body would, in some degree, be accepted by the Deity in atonement for the sins of his soul. How universal the instinct ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... Spaniards; still considering them as beings from the skies. From the admiral, it is true, they had experienced nothing but just and gentle treatment, and continual benefits; and the idea of his immediate influence with the Deity, manifested on the memorable occasion of the eclipse, may have made them consider him as more than human, and his presence as propitious to their island; but it is not easy to believe that a lawless gang like that of Porras, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... brought into unison with Kelly by the mediation of the angel Uriel. Afterwards he found himself deceived by him in his opinion that these spirits, which ministered unto him, were messengers of the Deity. They had several quarrels before-time; but when he found Kelly degenerating into the worst species of the magic art for purposes of avarice and fraud, he broke off all connection with him, and would never afterwards be seen in ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the beginning, middle, and end of all things, and he had been trusting, not in God, but in uncertain riches, that is in vile Mammon! It was a painful and humiliating discovery. "It was well," he said, "that my false deity should be taken from me! For my idolatry perhaps, a good gift has failed to reach my people! I must be more to them than ever, to make up to them for their ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... done it or anything like it twice. It was one of those deeds, supremeful sacrificial, that strain a man's moral energies to breaking point and render him incapable of further sacrifice; if, indeed, it did not render further sacrifice superfluous. Mr. Cartaret honestly felt that even an exacting deity could require ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... little man, awe-stricken. I had been bred to worship force, it was the only deity I knew, and Holy Joe was in my eyes the symbol of force. He radiated force, and it was a strange and wonderful force. I had glimpsed this power in Newman; now, for the first time in my life I saw it fully ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... chin, a sunburned nose, kindly blue eyes forever opened in mild wonder (and a bit bleared by the wind), the fat figure clad in broadly checked tweed knickerbockers and a rakish cap to match, like the mad tourists who sometimes strayed our way. 'Twas this complacent, benevolent Deity that she made haste to interrogate in my behalf, unabashed by the spats and binocular, the corpulent plaid stockings and cigar, which completed his attire. She spread her feet, in the way she had at such times; and she shut her eyes, and she set her teeth, and she clinched her ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... and the heaven of heavens cannot contain. Our eye-socket holds no eye. For it symbolises our worship of that Eye which is over all the earth; which is about our path, and about our bed, and spies out all our ways. We need no artificial and material presence of Deity. For we believe in That One Eternal and Universal Real Presence—of which it is written 'He is not far from anyone of us; for in God we live and move and have our being;' and again: 'Lo, I am with you even to the end ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... uncalled-for vehemence of your defence is a proof of disturbed confidence, of wanting belief in the infallibility of your semi-deity. The trailing robes of divinity have been blown aside by a chance breath of suspicion, and you had a glimpse of the clay feet. I am glad of it. Scepticism is the parent of rebellion, and the time is coming when fealty to ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... was taught concerning the nature either of the human mind or of the Deity, made a part of the system of physics. Those beings, in whatever their essence might be supposed to consist, were parts of the great system of the universe, and parts, too, productive of the most important effects. Whatever human reason could either conclude or conjecture ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... see with certain clearness that the last convulsions of the bureaucracy are at hand. Forgive me if I present it imaginatively. There was a people that had a chief temple, wherein dwelt a bloodthirsty deity, behind a curtain, guarded by priests. Once fearless hands tore the curtain away. Then all the people saw, instead of a god, a huge, shaggy, voracious spider, like a loathsome cuttlefish. They beat it and shoot at it: it is dismembered already; but ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... deity of the sea in the East Indies, to whom small boats, called beera, are annually sacrificed on the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... special messenger to the headmen and chiefs of the Delaware tribe beseeching them to cast aside all fallacious doctrines, to denounce the Prophet and to drive him out of their midst. In the course of this "speech" he said: "Demand of him some proof at least, of his being the messenger of the Deity. If God has really employed him, He has doubtless authorized him to perform miracles that he may be known and received as a prophet. If he is really a prophet, ask of him to cause the sun to stand still, the moon to alter ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... one portion of the Netherlanders and of the rest of the human race had been expressly created by the Deity to be for ever damned, and another portion to be eternally blessed. But this history has little to do with that infallible council save in the political effect of its decrees on the fate of Barneveld. It was said that the canons of Dordtrecht were likely ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... books are the reviews so bewildered as they are with this one. "The universe is ill-regulated," said the Liverpool Daily Post, "according to the fancy of Mr. Chesterton; but we are inclined to think that if the deity were to talk over matters with him, he would soon come to see that a Chestertonian cosmos would be no improvement on things as they are." On the other hand, the Toronto Globe remarks, "His boisterous optimism ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... morning of eternity, when the stars were young, her first grand oratorio burst upon raptured Deity, and thrilled the wondering angels; all heaven shouted; ten thousand times ten thousand jeweled harps, ten thousand times ten thousand angel tongues caught up the song; and ever since, through all the golden cycles, its breathing melodies, old as eternity, yet ever new as ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... life, General Morgan was dissipated; yet the teachings of a pious mother always made him reverential when his thoughts turned toward the Deity. In his latter years he professed religion and became a member of the Presbyterian Church in Winchester. "Ah!" he would often exclaim when talking of the past, "people said old Morgan never feared—they thought ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... all scientific researches. Any other representation contradicts both creation and revelation. Its denial is a proper object for the ridicule of every thinking man, and of the disbelief of every orthodox Christian. Let this, then, be our first and necessary conclusion—that Deity, whether creating, inspiring, or otherwise manifesting itself, is one ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... the ninth incarnation of Vishnoo, a Hindoo deity, and consists of a mere block of sacred wood, in the centre of which is said to be concealed a fragment of the original idol, which was fashioned by Vishnoo himself. The features and all the external parts are formed of a mixture ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... has then healed him," said Sovrani drily, "It is remarkable!—but if the cure is truly accomplished, we shall have to admit that the Deity does sometimes pay attention to our many prayers, though for the most part they appear to fall upon a deaf, dumb, and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... rejoicing always before him: rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; and my delight was with the sons of men,'—to attack her and her brother Apollo, Lord of light, and beauty, and culture, and grace, and inspiration,—to attack them, not in the name of Ormuzd, nor of any other deity, but in the name of mere brute force and lust of conquest. The old Persian spirit was gone out of them. They were the symbols now of nothing save despotism and self-will, wealth and self-indulgence. They, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... future are waiting for such as he. All their sluggish half-slumberous being will be roused and wrought into conscious life—nor the unconscious whence it arises be therein exhausted, for that will be ever supplied and upheld by the indwelling Deity. In his own way Franks was in conflict with the problems of life; neither was he very able to encounter them; but on the other hand he was one to whom wonders might safely be shown, for he would use them not speculatively but practically. ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... far greater license of conduct than to us, and ways enveloped in what to our eyes are mystery and shade; nay, I know not whether it be much less impious to question the paths of God's chosen than to scrutinize those of the Deity Himself." ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said to me one day, "I could pray to such a deity. Think you that it would be sin to utter a prayer like this of Socrates: 'Beloved Pan, and all ye gods who haunt this place, give me beauty of the inward soul, and may the outward and the inward man ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... moment of joy, that comes but once in a man's life, when he holds the woman he loves for the first time to his heart! Once, and once only, he tastes of heaven and forgets life itself in the short and delirious draught. What envious deity shall grudge him those moments of rapture, all too sweet, and, alas! all ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... soul. To him they are not blind, For some dim, undefined Reward of faith that thrills his untaught breast Links up his baser mind To the clear eyes of God that burn behind The stony brow. It is a creed professed Before a deity not quenched in space, But one to whom his bands Can lift adoring hands, And see and touch and worship ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... and followed the car of the general in military array, at one time singing and laughing over old country songs, then raising in chorus the paean of victory and recital of their deeds, to the glory of Aemilius, who was gazed upon and envied by all, disliked by no good man. Yet it seems that some deity is charged with tempering these great and excessive pieces of good fortune, and skimming as it were the cream off human life, so that none may be absolutely without his ills in this life; but as Homer says, they may seem to fare best ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... no more, I may no more thy deity adore Nor offer to thy shrine, I serve one more divine And farr more great y{^n} you: I must goe, Lest the foe Gaine the cause and win the day. Let's march bravely on Charge ym in the Van Our Cause God's is, Though their odds is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various
... fate for those, whose waking thoughts, and dreaming hopes, and intricate schemes, and desperate deeds, were only aimed at gold, more gold? God of this world, if such be thy rewards, let me ever escape them! idol of the knave, false deity of the fool, if this be thy blessing on thy votaries—come, curse me, Mammon, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... with these their representatives of the deity, and it is very curious to observe a devout Russian kissing the toe of one, crossing himself before another, while to another he will in addition prostrate himself, even with his head to the ground; this latter is also very frequently done at intervals during the celebration ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... I was much affected by Phaedo, but think the argument weak in many respects. The nature of abstract ideas is clearly set forth; but there is no justice in reasoning, from their existence, that our souls have lived previous to our present state, since it was as easy for the Deity to create at once the idea of beauty within us, as the sense which brings to the soul intelligence that it exists in some outward shape. He does not clearly show his opinion of what the soul is; whether eternal ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... priests are particularly careful to obliterate the marks of our heathen feet on their beautiful floor of golden sand. Inside are eight figures of the good Buddha, alternately standing and sitting, depicted with that calm, inscrutable countenance so remarkable in the image of this deity wherever this religion prevails. Before each figure is a small altar, littered with flowers, the most conspicuous blossom being the lotus lily, the symbol of this faith. Other than these devotional oblations there is little to be seen; what part in ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... to cheer him on the homeward journey. You raise it in both hands, and when the bung has been removed, allow the liquor to flow stream-wise down your throat. It was a most extraordinary Bacchic procession—a pomp which, though undreamed of on the banks of the Ilissus, proclaimed the deity of Dionysos in authentic fashion. Struggling horses, grappling at the ice-bound floor with sharp-spiked shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, some clad in sheepskins from Italian valleys, some brown as bears in rough Graubuenden homespun; casks, dropping their ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... matters of general interest; on irrigation, the gift of tongues, the season's crop of peaches, the pouring out of the Spirit abroad, the best mixture of sheep-dip; on many matters not unpleasing to the practical-minded Deity reigning over them. ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... hypothesis of chance in accounting for the universe. 'Let us think of the supreme causality as we may, the fact remains that from it there emanates a directive influence of uninterrupted consistency, on a scale of stupendous magnitude and exact precision worthy of our highest conceptions of deity[11].' The argument was developed in the words of Professor Baden Powell. 'That which requires reason and thought to understand must be itself thought and reason. That which mind alone can investigate or express must ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... excitability, vibrating between the desire of gain and the terror of consequences, assumed a new form. Some of them groaned; some of them twisted their fingers frantically in their hair; some of them called on the Deity worshipped by their fathers to bear witness how they had suffered, by dispensing with references in other cases of precious deposits; one supremely aged and dirty Jew actually suggested placing an embargo on the lady and her necklace, and sending information ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... you ask a worshipper of him that was so long his rival, to repeat a saying, a maxim, a sentence, of which his idol is the author, it is odds but he will look like a fool, and visit you with an evasive answer. What else should he do? His deity is a man of many words and no sayings. He is the prince of agitators, but it would be impossible for him to mint a definition of 'agitation'; he is the world's most eloquent arithmetician, but it ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... intention on her part there to always remain. It was like entering the vestibule of heaven. She records of her first night there: "I lifted up my eyes to the heavens; they were unclouded and serene; I imagined that I felt the presence of the Deity smiling on my sacrifice, and already offering me a reward in the consolatory peace ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... which in our hearts arise— Since loving knowledge, not humility— Though they be curious, godless, and unwise, Yet prove our nature feels a Deity; For if these strifes rose out of other grounds, Man were to God ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... my lord: I talked of no deity. I talked of a living Love that gave us birth and calls us his children. Your deity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... hollow within, three male persons—a young man, an old man, and a boy—seem to be bringing home, somewhat wearily, to their "long home," the young man, his armour, the boy, and the old man, like old Socrates, the mortuary cock, as they approach some shadowy, ancient deity of the tomb, or it may be the throned impersonation of their "fathers of old." The marble surface was coloured, at least in part, with fixtures of metal here and there. The designer, whoever he may have been, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... rather, I should say, our realities, are all of them like our Gods, based on superstitious foundations. If man is a microcosm then kosmos is a megalanthrope and that is how we come to anthropomorphise the deity. In the eternal pendulum swing of thought we make God in our own image, and then make him make us, and then find it out and cry because we have no God and so on, over and over again as a child has new toys given to it, tires of ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... nor safe to speculate, and still less to dogmatise, concerning the meaning of the divine acts, but here, at all events, we have, as I believe, not a man making unwarranted assertions about God's purposes, but God Himself by a man, letting us see so far into the depths of Deity as to know the very deepest meaning of His very greatest acts, and when God speaks, it is neither reverent nor safe ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... different lyric school. The brilliant simplicity and pointed grace of the three stanzas to [OE]none ("What conscience, say, is it in thee") recall the lyrists of the Restoration in their cleanlier and happier mood. And in the very fine epigram headed by the words "Devotion makes the Deity" he has expressed for once a really high and deep thought in words of really noble and severe propriety. His "Mad Maid's Song," again, can only be compared with Blake's; which has more of passionate imagination, if less of ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... there had ever been, or if there still anywhere existed, a people entirely destitute of religion, it would be in consequence of an exceptional downfall which would be tantamount to a lapse into animality."[5] I am not therefore inquiring after the origin of the idea and sentiment of the Deity, in a general sense, but after the origin of the idea of the only and Almighty Creator as we possess it. In fact, if religion is universal, distinct knowledge of ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... in the British Museum. Where this was the case it was so stated, but there were many genuine things, amongst which I noted a wooden statue dating back about 1,000 years before Christ, being the wife, and also sister of Osiris, and mother of Horus, chief deity of Egypt. Strictly on the stroke of four o'clock a policeman went through the building and called out that the buildings must be closed. I made a request to one of these policemen to see the curator, and he took me to his office; he was, unfortunately, ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... quite enough to convince the majority of the warriors that they indeed stood in the presence of deity—their faces showed it only too plainly, and a sudden modesty that caused them to shrink behind their neighbors. As their neighbors were attempting to do the same thing, the result was a sudden melting away ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the Deity (even at that stressful moment, to his eternal credit, in French) and took his miniature driver. His ball, hit much too hard, pitched in the same bunker, crossed it, climbed up the face of it, and joined mine on the green. Utterly unnerved, we toddled down ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... ever be "honoured with instructions to sell;" that his eulogistic pen would be employed in giving the puff superlative to the Elysian haunts of quondam fashion—in other words, in painting the lily, gilding refined gold? But, alas! Simpson, the tutelar deity, has departed ("died," some say, but we don't believe it), and at the moment he made his last bow, Vauxhall ought to have closed; it was madness—the madness which will call us, peradventure, superstitious—which kept the gates open ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... distraction with the cares of this life, that they, as natural brute beasts made to be destroyed, are never at leisure to consider either the nature and necessity of their noble souls, or to converse with the notion of a Deity. Thou may perceive a company of self-deceiving speculatists, who make broad the phylacteries of their garments, and boast of some high attainments in religion; yea, would have others look upon them as arrived at the very porch of heaven, and advanced to a high ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... fain know more of the religion of the Hebrews," said Lycidas; "I have heard marvellous stories—more sublime than any that our poets have sung—of a Deity bringing this people out of Egypt, making a path for them through the depths of the sea, reining back its foaming waves as a rider his white-maned steed; giving to the thirsty—water from the rock, to the hungry—bread from the skies, and scattering ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... the fire of their parched palates. Unslaked thirst was a misery unknown to the mariners of these lakes: it was but to cast their buckets deep into the tempting element, and water, pure, sweet, and grateful as any that ever bubbled from the moss-clad fountain of sylvan deity, came cool and refreshing to their lips, neutralising, in a measure, the crudities of the coarsest food. It was to this inestimable advantage the crew of the schooner had been principally indebted for their health, during the long series of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... that, with all my seeming good fortune, I am not happier than yourself." And so much was he agitated while he delivered this, that it was with difficulty he came to the conclusion. When he did, he bowed with reverence, as if leaving the presence of a deity, ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... gentle Deity appear, Thou who still hear'st, and yet art prone to hear: Whose eye ne'er closes, and whose brains ne'er rest, (Thy own dear Dulness bawling at thy breast) Attend, O Patience, on thy arm reclin'd, And see Wit's endless ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... really compatible with the idea of God which reason gives us. Mr. Mozley remarks that the question of miracles is really "shut up in the enclosure of one assumption, that of the existence of God"; and that if we believe in a personal Deity with all power over nature, that belief brings along with it the possibility of His interrupting natural order for His own purposes. He also bids us observe that the idea of God which reason gives us is exposed to resistance of the same kind, and from precisely ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... present established relations of our appetites to the time-honoured savours, by which the ancient Jews sought to propitiate the Deity, are destined to be superseded. On the other hand it is quite possible that all the juggling of modern "machine" cookery is a false step, and injurious to digestion and health. It is not unlikely that there is ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... river; its inclination is sufficient to admit of its receiving the name of a nose. Without the least intention of alluding to our hero, the early settlers had affixed the name of St. Anthony, who appears to have been a kind of Dutch deity in this state, and to have monopolized all the natural noses within her boundaries to himself. The vulgar idiom made the pronunciation an-TONY's nose—and all this Charles briefly explained to Miss Emmerson and her niece by way of giving point to his own wit. He had hardly ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... spirits which assailed them. The supreme majesty of Oro, the great god of their mythology, was declared in the coco-nut log from which his image was rudely carved. Upon one of the Tonga Islands there stands a living tree, revered itself as a deity. Even upon the Sandwich Islands the coco palm retains all its ancient reputation; the people there having thought of adopting it ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... good while, at Carlo Dolce's portrait of the Eternal Father, for it is a miracle and masterpiece of absurdity, and almost equally a miracle of pictorial art. It is the All-powerless, a fair-haired, soft, consumptive deity, with a mouth that has fallen open through very weakness. He holds one hand on his stomach, as if the wickedness and wretchedness of mankind made him qualmish; and he is looking down out of Heaven with an expression of pitiable appeal, or as if seeking somewhere for assistance ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the early Empire in equal dread of Caesar and of the populace, at once unscrupulous and timid, contemning Jewish prejudice, yet, with lingering mythological superstition, trembling at the hint of a present Deity in human form; and, lost in the bewilderment of the later Greek philosophy, greeting the word truth with the startled inquiry, what it might be. What is truth? It had been the question of Miss Fennimore's life, and she felt a blank and a disappointment ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a smile, That I may venge my noble brother's death; And in the midst of stately Troinouant, I'll build a temple to thy deity Of perfect marble and of Iacinthe stones, That it shall pass the high Pyramids, Which with their top ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... the outline of the story is the same. In the Mahabharatic version, Manu, like Noah, stands alone in an age of universal depravity. His virtues, however, are of the Indian cast—the most severe and excruciating penance by which he extorts, as it were, the favour of the deity[158]. ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... of a land, whom the sun so especially favoured— saw and blessed it, for it was good, than, amid innumerable contradictions and extravagant assumptions, to decide upon that remoter shore, whence was transplanted a deity, whose effects were so benignant, whose worship was so natural, to the Greeks. And in the more plain belief we are also borne out by the more sound inductions of learning. For it is noticeable that neither ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was springing from its vitals based on freer thought, in which the intellect and heart had more share in determining righteousness. The fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man became the themes of discourse, oftener than those of the vengeance of an offended Deity; and pity and forgiveness, oftener than ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... then the heart alarming, And all resistless charming, In Love's delightful fetters she chains the willing soul! Ambition would disown The world's imperial crown, Even Avarice would deny His worship'd deity, And feel thro' ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... sacrifices according to this rite, is born from the womb of Agni and the offerings, participates in the nature of the Rik, Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred knowledge), the Brahma (sacred element) and immortality, and is absorbed into the deity. ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... attribute, it is simply denying imperfection. The student knows that in the history of the doctrine of attributes, the recognition of negative attributes marks a great advance in philosophic reasoning. Maimonides holds that the conception of the Deity as a pure abstraction is the only one truly philosophic. His evidences for the existence, the immateriality, and the unity of God, are conceived in the same spirit. In offering them he follows Aristotle's reasoning closely, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... was alone, were full of a wise, condemning observation; his mouth was inclined always in a set smile at the bitter humor of things. The face of this elderly New England shoemaker looked not unlike some Asiatic conception of a deity. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the hall was the colossal figure of the king in adoration before the supreme deity, or receiving from his eunuch the holy cup. He was attended by warriors bearing his arms, and by the priests or presiding divinities. His robes, and those of his followers, were adorned with groups of figures, animals, and flowers, all painted with brilliant colors. The stranger ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... to me," he said, "that if AEsop had observed this he would have made a fable from it, how the Deity, wishing to reconcile these warring principles, when he could not do so, united their heads together, and from hence whomsoever the one visits the other attends immediately after; as appears to be the case with me, since I suffered pain in my leg before from the chain, but now ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... these affairs were thus by the favour of the deity brought to an end, the victorious soldiers were recalled at the close of the day to their camp by the signal of the trumpeter, and marched towards the bank of the Rhine, and there erecting a rampart of shields piled together in several rows, they refreshed themselves ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... is to indicate the line and the nature of the effort required of you and if clearly followed, Progress and Growth will commence from the first day. In connection with this, a little digression would be necessary. The Occultist says: Nature, unaided, fails. The purposiveness of Deity, manifesting in nature an evolution, is present in all individual centres but it has the way to full expression opened out to itself only when the more evolved centres of life consciously cooperate with it. Evolution is started and carried only by the creation of centres within ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... to meditate upon metaphysical truths, and to trace up things to their first principles, may know the Deity by its idea; and I own that is a sure way to arrive at the source of all truth. But the more direct and short that way is, the more difficult and unpassable it is for the generality of mankind who depend on ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... enacted their Lex Regia: whereby Quod placuit principi legis habuit vigorem; that is, the Will and pleasure of the Prince had the force of law. His minions had taken infinite pains to paint to their imaginations the god-like virtues of Caesar: They first persuaded them to believe that he was a deity, and then to sacrifice to him those Rights and Liberties which their ancestors had so long maintained, with unexampled bravery, and with blood & treasure. By this act they fixed a precedent fatal to all posterity: The Roman people afterwards, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... possession, but much more so when it is remembered how many thousands are perpetually receiving from them, not merely a transitory pleasure, but such thrilling perpetuity of pure emotion, such lofty subject for scientific speculation, and such deep lessons of natural religion, as only the work of a Deity can impress, and only the spirit of an immortal can feel: they should remember that the slightest deformity, the most contemptible excrescence, can injure the effect of the noblest natural scenery, as a note of discord can annihilate the expression of ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... costly presents at the shrine when they came. These presents, it was supposed, tended to induce the god who presided over the oracle to give to those who made them favorable and auspicious replies. The deity that dictated the predictions ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... corner had its meaning and its history. In the play of his fancy he had seen the white-robed priests and acolytes in stately procession, amid the old, old walls; heard strains of far-off music when an ancient worship offered its votary of prayer and praise to that mysterious deity whom they believed in; heard perhaps a single lovely voice, or seen a single lovely convert kneel before the Sacred Enclosure. He had seen their strong men and their brave men and their great men marshalling a host of women and children and infirm citizens safely into the ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... part more than the whole, And love yourself more than all human kind, Who persecute good men with prudence blind Because they combat your malign control, See Scribes and Pharisees, each impious school, Each sect profane, o'erthrown by his great mind, Whose best our good to Deity refined, The while they thought Death triumphed o'er his soul. Deem you that only you have thought and sense, While heaven and all its wonders, sun and earth, Scorned in your dullness, lack intelligence? Fool! what produced you? These things gave ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... through his mind that probably there was something else in the box besides the plates, which would be of pecuniary advantage to him.... Joseph was overcome by the power of darkness, and forgot the injunction that was laid upon him. "The mistakes which the Deity made in Joe's character constantly suggest to the lay reader the query why the Urim and Thummim were not turned ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... where it lies like a wounded bird, its heart-blood welling out—when it is home cold and pale before her, and the mother, sister, daughter wail and moan—then the beautiful goddess who has gotten up this little drama for her amusement, finds her false philosophy broken in her breast, her deity overthrown, her supreme resolution crushed in presence of this terrible spectacle; and she wrings her hands, and sobs and cries out at the evil she has done; but cries much louder, that the hearts of men are horrible and bloody; that their instincts ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... Mulvaney sprang up, suiting the action to the word, and sliding gravely in front of us, a dilapidated but imposing deity in the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... was confounded in their minds with the Great Spirit. The Algonquins believed in a Water God, who opposes himself to the benevolent designs of the Great Spirit; it is strange that the name of the Great Tiger should be given to this Deity, as the country does not produce such an animal, and from this it appears probable that the tradition of his existence had come from elsewhere. They have also a third Deity, who presides over their winter season. The gods of the Indians have ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... that the philosophy of our time contradicts this doctrine. Many of our thinking brains have undertaken to drive out by mockery this heavenly instinct from the human soul, to efface the effigy of Deity in the soul, and to dissolve this energy, this noble enthusiasm, in the cold, killing breath of a pusillanimous indifference. Under the slavish influence of their own unworthiness they have entered into terms with self-interest, the dangerous foe of benevolence; they have done this to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... upon the vasty waters, no spirit ever travailed in the womb of time and conceived the cosmos. There is no God and man is not made in his image; eternity is an eyeless socket—a socket that never beheld the burning splendors of the Deity. There is no God, O my God! And my cries are futile, for have I not gazed into my mirror, gazed with clear ironic frantic gaze and missed my own image! There is no God; yet has my denial been heard in blackest Eblis, and has it not reverberated unto the very edges of Time? There is no God, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... the American School at Jerusalem are busy at Samaria and they believe they have uncovered portions of the great temple of Baal, which King Ahab erected in honor of the wicked deity 890 B.C. When the remains of this temple are fully uncovered it will be learned just how far the Israelites forsook the worship of the true God for that ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... persons, who have any secret affairs to settle, enjoy all possible privacy; for even the waiter never has the imprudence to enter without being called. In these asylums, Love arranges under his laws many individuals not suspected of sacrificing at the shrine of that wonder-working deity. Prudes, whose virtue is the universal boast, and whose austerity drives thousands of beaux to despair, sometimes make themselves amends for the reserve which they are obliged to affect in public, by indulging in a private tete-a-tete in these mysterious recesses. In them too, young lovers ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... consequently, as it is shining full upon our burnished hull, those people, in the position they now occupy, will be able to see nothing but a shapeless blaze of dazzling effulgence, which they will doubtless take as an outward manifestation of their particular deity's favour, and an indication that he is present to crown their ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... had led forlorn hopes in their time—led with a curse or a jest on their tongues, and in their souls an unswerving faith in the God of Chance. But that merciful deity had been shut out from the present deal. They studied the face of Malemute Kid, but they studied as one might the Sphinx. As the quiet minutes passed, a feeling that speech was incumbent on them began to grow. At last the howl of a wolf-dog cracked the silence from the direction of Forty-Mile. The ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... replaced. Magnificence and tyranny, power and cruelty, wisdom and dissimulation, respect and fear, were inseparably associated in the minds of a people so governed. They comprehended nothing in religion but a God armed with omnipotence and vengeance, or in politics but a king as terrible as the deity he represented. ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... manner of evil. (Note: Other variants of the legend say the young men were mischievously unkind and cruel to the old men, rather than that an old man was bad. H.G.L.) Baholikonga (big water serpent deity) got angry at this and turned the world upside down, and water spouted up through the kivas and through the fireplaces in the houses. The earth was rent in great chasms, and water covered everything except one narrow ridge of mud; and across this the serpent deity told all the people to travel. ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... disposed to think there was no middle course between natural religion and the Church of Rome. The first creed which he examines is that of Deism; which he rejects, because the worship of one sole deity was not known to the philosophers of antiquity, and is therefore obviously to be ascribed to revelation. Revelation thus proved, the puzzling doubt occurs, whether the Scripture, as contended by Calvinists, was to be the sole rule of faith, or whether the rules and ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... consulting the senate, he should celebrate out of the spoils, if he had reserved any for the purpose; otherwise, at his own expense." Accordingly, Publius Cornelius exhibited those games through the space of ten days. About this time the temple of the great Idaean Mother was dedicated; which deity, on her being brought from Asia, in the consulate of Publius Cornelius Scipio, afterwards surnamed Africanus, and Publius Lucinius, the above-mentioned Publius Cornelius had conducted from the sea-side to the Palatine. In pursuance of a decree of the senate, Marcus Livius and Caius ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... It was before Deity, embodied in a human form, walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of the Synagogue, and the doubts of the Academy, and the ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only to resolve the whole of creation into spirit, but to add also to this immaterial system, some pervading principle, some abstract nonentity of love and beauty—of which, as a substitute at least for Deity—the philosophic bishop had ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... basin, supported upon twelve oxen, also of marble and of life size, and of which they told some romantic stories. They said the deluded persons, most of whom were emigrants from a great distance, believed their deity countenanced their reception here of a baptism of regeneration as proxies for whomsoever they held in warm affection in the countries from which they had come: that here parents "went into the water" for their lost children, children for their parents, widows for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... certain of those root-truths," said Templeton, who seemed to have a lingering sympathy with my victim; "he insisted most strongly, and spoke, you will not deny, eloquently and nobly on the Unity of the Deity." ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... I stand there? I never had a brother: Nor can there be that deity in my nature Of here and everywhere. I had a sister Whom the blind waves and surges have devoured:— [To Viola.] Of charity, what kin are you to me? What countryman, what name, ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... in consenting to worship this unholy God, Mr. Mill is not asked to do harm to his neighbour, so that his refusal reposes simply on his perception of the immorality of the requisition. It is also noteworthy that an omnipotent Deity is supposed incapable of altering Mr. Mill's mind and ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... knocking about the world, now I am at home, and home without you, my household deity, would ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... is no God!" Such is the exulting song of many a human heart when bewildering metaphysics or superficial science has crowded from its convictions faith in the Deity and his moral government. Few men have reached the pure, unclouded heights of religion and morality, where the unselfish love of the holy and the right, for their own inherent excellence, forms the controlling motive of their conduct, ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... Here, too, the political situation is always the chief factor, and it is only incidentally that the religion comes into play,—as when it is said that Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, was murdered while worshipping in the temple dedicated to a deity, Nisroch; or when a prophet, to intensify the picture of the degradation to which the proud king of Babylon is to be reduced, introduces Babylonian conceptions of the nether world into his discourse.[5] Little, too, is furnished by the Book ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... Divine right for them precisely because they deny divinity. Or, at least, they profess to do so; but they re-establish it in another shape, which immediately makes one regret the old. M. A—— is a sectary of the goddess Reason, of whom he has made a Moloch, an oppressive deity hungry for sacrifice. No more liberty of thought for any one except for himself and his friends; such is the free thought of M. A——. The outlook is truly attractive. But perhaps too many idols have been cast down during the last ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... thou in spirit kneel beside that little child; As fondly pray, as purely feel, with heart as undefiled; That moment would encircle thee with light and love divine, Thy soul might rest on Deity, and heaven itself ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... sung in the following hymn by the Greek philosopher CLE-AN'THES, said to be the only one of his numerous writings that has been preserved. Like many others of the ancient hymns of adoration, it presents us with high spiritual conceptions of the unity and attributes of Deity; and had it been addressed to Jehovah it would have been deemed a grand tribute to his majesty and a noble specimen of deep ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... We had not counted upon such weather in the sunny south. I recollected now that the Greeks were wont to represent Boreas as a chilly deity, and spoke of the Thracian breeze with the same deferentially deprecating adjectives which we ourselves apply to the east wind of our fatherland; but that apt classical memory somehow failed to console or warm me. A good-natured male passenger, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... religion in rousing and sharpening the sense of duty. Webster spoke for the English-speaking races, and found his phrases in the Bible, when he said that this sense "pursues us ever. It is omnipresent like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... says, on page 296 of that work, "I cannot conjecture whether Babia, who seems to have been reverenced among the Syrians as goddess of childhood and youth, is identical with the Syrian Venus or not, and I do not remember to have met with any mention of this deity except ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... legions, rules from East to West and from North to South, with absolute and undivided sovereignty. The Caesars reach the summit of human greatness and power, and the city of Romulus becomes the haughty mistress of the world. The emperor is worshiped as a deity, and the proud metropolis calls herself eternal. An empire is established by force of arms and by a uniform policy, such as this world has not ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the genealogist, "when I shall inform thee of thy parentage and descent, let not there be any present who may hear me." "Wherefore?" replied the sultan. "My lord," answered the sharper, "you know the attributes of the Deity should be veiled in mystery." The sultan now commanded all his attendants to retire, and when they were alone, the genealogist advanced and said, "Mighty prince, thou art illegitimate, and the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... held, a sphere, yet antipodes were an unscriptural heresy. Above it were the heavens, in which the stars were fixed, or wandered; and above them heaven after heaven, each tenanted by its own orders of beings, up to that heaven of heavens in which Deity—and by Him, be it always remembered, the ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... three, then the Father, the Son, or the Spirit must needs be that one, if any one only; so then the other two are nothing. Again, if the reality of a being be neither in the Father, Son, nor Spirit, as such, but in the eternal Deity, without consideration of Father Son and Spirit as three, then neither of the three are any thing but notions in us, or manifestations of the Godhead, or nominal distinctions, so related by the word; but if so, then when the Father sent the Son, and the Father and Son the Spirit, one notion ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... drawing a handful of coin from his pocket, handing one of the pieces to each of the girls, and retaining one himself. "As fate is the deity to be consulted, let fate take care of her own. The one who happens to hold the piece of oldest date shall take the first chance, and the others will follow according to the same rule. I have settled more than ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... street in which his house stood, the horse he rode, the cattle he pastured, the wife he married, the child that was born to him, the plague of which he died or from which he recovered, each suggested a deity, and he made one to preside over each. So too with qualities and powers more abstract." R.W. Livingstone: The Greek Genius and Its ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... revelation of divine truth, once attained, supersedes specific moral injunctions; ceremonies and systems, even, of religion, become indifferent to the mind illuminated by the sacred idea. A higher degree is the perfect conception or ecstatic vision of the Deity;—the highest-reserved only for the prophetic few—a real immediate union with his essence. Here, it will be seen, are four steps or stages, each of which has its sacred manual or appropriate system of teaching. In the hieratic ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... two or three other particulars of his life, real or fabulous, in order to explain what follows in the text concerning him. First, then, he was thought to be so great a favourite of Apollo, that the priests of that deity allotted him a constant share of their offerings. It was said of him, as of some other illustrious men, that at his birth a swarm of bees lighted on his lips, and fed him with their honey. It was also a ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... origin of the imperatorial office, could not be devolved upon a council. Council there was none, nor could be recognised as such in the State machinery. The emperor, himself a sacred and sequestered creature, might be supposed to enjoy the secret tutelage of the Supreme Deity; but a council, composed of subordinate and responsible agents, could not. Again, the auspices of the emperor, and his edicts, apart even from any celestial or supernatural inspiration, simply as emanations of his own divine character, had a value and a consecration which could never belong ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the functions and arts of kingcraft, that in his hands it almost lost its treacherous character, and assumed the appearance of sincerity. He held that a king who acted openly and transparently, neglected his duty, as the vicegerent of the Deity; and that, for the sake of good government and the happiness of his people, he was bound always to conceal his intentions under false appearances, or, when necessary, under false statements. Somerset was sitting beside the king, whose hand rested familiarly on ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... mistook the statue of Pou't'ai, God of Comfort, for that of the real porcelain-deity, as Jacquemart and others observe. This error does not, however, destroy the beauty of the myth; and there is no good reason to doubt that D'Entrecolles related it as it had been told him by some ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... is the soul as related to Nature and to God. The soul is primal; Nature, in all its bountiful and beautiful commodities, exists for the training of the soul; it is the soul's shadow. And every soul has immediate access to Deity. Thus the utility and beauty and discipline of Nature lift the soul Godward. The typical sentence of the book is this: "The sun shines today also"; that is to say: the world is still alive and fair; ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... his exceeding great comfort and satisfaction; because he, by this means, comes to consider, know, and understand that, which otherwise he would never have considered, known, or understood; that is, how great is the power, wisdom, and goodness of the Deity. He then descends into nature, and acknowledges her for the daughter of God; and sees, and even feels with his hands, that, which in any other age, or with a perception less clear, he could never have seen or felt. He then truly discerns ...
— Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life • Lewis Cornaro
... epoch was a barbarous one, and a multitude of passages recall the wild savageness of the people. We find in these legends as many scenes of slaughter and ferocious deeds as in the oldest Germanic poems: Provincia ferox, said Tacitus of Britain. The time is still distant when woman shall become a deity; the murder of a man is compensated by twenty-one head of cattle, and the murder of a woman by three head only.[15] The warlike valour of the heroes is carried as far as human nature and imagination allow; not even Roland or Ragnar Lodbrok die more ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand |
