"Anthropomorphic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... way he seems to see existence as an illusion and yet as an obligation. To every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a love-call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the command of Nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of Nature instead of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the celandines ever after drew her with a little spell. Anthropomorphic as she was, she stimulated him into appreciating things thus, and then they lived for her. She seemed to need things kindling in her imagination or in her soul before she felt she had them. And she was cut ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... sensible ideas about Him? Why not follow the rule of the old Bible? Can we do better? It constantly speaks of Him in the language that we use of men. The scholars, with their fondness for big words, say the Bible is anthropomorphic. That simply means that it uses man's words, and man's ideas of things in telling about God. It makes use of the common words and ideas, that man understands fully, to tell about the God, whom he doesn't know. Could there be a more sensible ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... from and even antithetic to that with which we have hitherto been concerned. Nothing, we might be inclined to say on the basis of what we have at present ascertained, nothing could be more opposed to the clear anthropomorphic vision of the Greek, than that conception of a mystic exaltation, so constantly occurring in the history of religion, whose aim is to transcend the limits of human personality and pass into direct communion with the divine life. Yet of some such conception, and of the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... ghost story in the diary, quite original, and told with an air of excellent credibility; and also a short anthropomorphic romance concerning a badly treated horse, full of genuine pathos and kindly sympathy,—more sympathetic, in fact, than Hawthorne's later stories, in which he is sometimes almost ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... a Theist. He had a profound and earnest conviction of the existence of a God, and he ridiculed with sarcastic force, the anthropomorphic absurdities of the popular religion. This one God, he taught, was self-existent, eternal, and infinite; supreme in power, in goodness, and intelligence.[447] These characteristics are ascribed to ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... 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 supernatural. He is a present, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... sympathy was derived from the singular vivacity with which the Celtic races have inspired their feeling for nature. Their mythology is nothing more than a transparent naturalism, not that anthropomorphic naturalism of Greece and India, in which the forces of the universe, viewed as living beings and endowed with consciousness, tend more and more to detach themselves from physical phenomena, and to become moral ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... SHAPES and FIGURES of the various deities. It does not apply to the genesis of the widespread belief in spirits or a Great Spirit generally; that, as I think will become clear, has quite another source. Some people have jeered at the 'animistic' or 'anthropomorphic' tendency of primitive man in his contemplation of the forces of Nature or his imaginations of religion and the gods. With a kind of superior pity they speak of "the poor Indian whose untutored mind sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind." But I must confess that to me the "poor ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... less of a spirit is he. Mr. Matthew Arnold might as well have said: '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, either ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... 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 born of an egg which the sacred fishes found in the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... proceeded upon an ideal system, while that of the latter was exclusively founded upon experience. He began with the idea of the godhead, and showed the necessity of considering it as an eternal and unchanging existence, and represented the anthropomorphic conceptions of the Greeks concerning their gods as mere prejudices. In his works he retained the poetic form of composition, some fragments of which he himself recited at public festivals, after the manner ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... modern metaphysical phraseology, is best termed "The Absolute," was expressed by Emerson as the Over-Soul, and this term meant something much greater, more unescapable than the anthropomorphic God of the church-goers. His assurance of unity with this Divine Spiritual Essence was perfect. It savors more of what is termed the religious view of life than of the philosophic, but we contend that in the coming era of the cosmic conscious man, all life will be religious, in ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... person, individual, adult, someone; mankind, humanity; valet; Primates, Anthropidae. Associated Words: anthropology, anthropogeny, anthropography, anthropolite, anthropoid, anthropometry, anthropometric, anthropocentric, anthropomorphic, android, manikin, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Supernatural Religion about which Dr. Lightfoot has been writing cannot be my work, but is simply a work of his own imagination. That work cannot possibly have contained, for instance, the chapter on "Anthropomorphic Divinity," [36:2] in which, on the contrary, I studiously commit myself to very decided disbelief in such a "Personal God" as he means. In no way inconsistent with that chapter are my concluding remarks, contrasting with the spasmodic Jewish Divinity a Supreme ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... sky, between the bright deities and the demons of night; but the Greek poet, influenced perhaps by some dim historical tradition, has located the contest on the shore of the Hellespont, and in his mind the actors, though superhuman, are still completely anthropomorphic. Of the true origin of his epic story he knew as little as Euhemeros, or Lord ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... the astrologer for a horoscope of his racer is a fact that insinuatingly elevates the beast to the plane of his master. In the short story of 1921, the monkey, the tiger, the elephant, the dog and all their kind are treated from an anthropomorphic point of view. Courtney Ryley Cooper's titles—"Love" and "Vengeance," for example—covering stories dominated by the animal character, betray the author's ascription of human attributes to his hero or villain. "Reynardine," by Donn Byrne, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... coming in to betray and ruin Hardy's. It has been said that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent Him. But it is not often, as in Mr. Hardy's case, that it is necessary to invent Him in order to prove how unnecessary (and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphic out of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it a piece of his mind. But the fight is unequal for the old philosophical reason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of its mind to fight with. One curious result of ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... night as he voyaged to Egypt: "Who was it, gentlemen, who made these stars?" has never been answered. To say that the Universe was made by immutable laws only put the question one degree further back as to who made the laws. I did not, of course, believe in an anthropomorphic God, but I believed then, as I believe now, in an intelligent Force behind all the operations of Nature—a force so infinitely complex and great that my finite brain could get no further than its existence. Right and wrong I saw also as great obvious facts which ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... does arise is exactly that which, as a matter of science, should arise; that is to say, the anthropomorphic interpretation is applied only to those phaenomena which, in their general nature, or their apparent capriciousness, resemble those which the child observes to be caused by itself, or by beings like itself. All the rest are regarded as things which ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... some degree comprehend the effect of technical language in mystifying the uninitiated hearer. We recall in this connection a sermon in which, years ago, we heard a very young preacher declaiming to an audience of labouring men and women concerning a certain "anthropomorphic" passage. As we say he was very young, and probably no longer uses the word outside the study. Another worthy man in our hearing solemnly advised a congregation largely composed of factory girls to make their lives "Christo-centric." ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... chapter in, Sec 10.] But the difference of language scarcely carries with it a substantial difference of thought. [Footnote: "Though the philosopher as such may shun the term 'God' on account of its anthropomorphic associations, and may prefer to speak of the 'conscious principle,' or of the 'universal self,' yet the latter has in substance the same meaning as the former." FITE, An Introductory Study of Ethics, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... 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 ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy |
