The Gods Quotes

“Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.”
― Baruch De Spinoza, Ethics

“As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.”
― Diogenes Laertius

“The gods are what has failed to become of us”
― W.S. Merwin, The Lice: Poems

“But friend, we come too late. It's true that the gods live,
But up over our heads, up in a different world.
They function endlessly up there, and seem to care little
If we live or die, so much do they avoid us.
A weak vessel cannot hold them forever; humans can
Endure the fullness of the gods only at times. Therefore
Life itself becomes a dream about them.”
― Friedrich Hölderlin

“Stay hungry on the path you trod to overcome all odds though fate & the gods seem to pepper your plate with a barrage of sabotage.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“As for the Economy, this new embodiment as I called it of Fate or the Gods, this global power that governs the lives of Chinese workers in village factories, Brazilian miners, children working cocoa plantations in West Africa, sex workers in Mumbai, real estate salesmen in Connecticut, sheep-farmers in Scotland or on the Darling Downs, disembodied voices in call centres in Bangalore, workers in the hospitality industry in Cancun or Venice or Fiji, keeping them fatefully interconnected, in its mysterious way, by laws that do exist, the experts assure us, though they cannot agree on what they are- it is too impersonal, too implacable for us to live comfortably with, or even to catch hold of and defy.
When we were in the hands of the Gods, we had stories that made these distant beings human and brought them close. They got angry, they took our part or turned violently against us. They fell in love with us and behaved badly. They had their own problems and fought with one another, and like us were sometimes foolish. But their interest in us was personal. They watched over us and were concerned though in moments of willfulness or boredom they might also torment us as “wanton boys” do flies. We had our ways of obtaining their help as intermediaries. We could deal with them.
The Economy is impersonal. It lacks manageable dimensions. We have discovered no mythology to account for its moods. Our only source of information about it, the Media and their swarm of commentators, bring us “reports,” but these do not help: a possible breakdown in the system, a new crisis, the descent of Greece, or Ireland or Portugal, like Jove’s eagle, of the IMF. We are kept in a state of permanent low-level anxiety broken only by outbreaks of alarm.”
― David Malouf, The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

“The hells move in cycles,
No man can see his own end.
The Gods have not returned. "They have never left us."
They have not returned.”
― Ezra Pound, The Cantos

“If there is one thing in this world that I was raised and trained to know, it is that there is only so much you may ask of the gods. Victory in battle is their lightest gift; a quiet heart is your own concern.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Innkeeper's Song

“Sometimes the mere rhythm of a sentence will require God instead of the Gods; at other times the two syllables of ‘the Gods’ will be necessary, and I’ll verbally change universe; on still other occasions what will matter is an internal rhyme, a metrical displacement, or a burst of emotion, and polytheism or monotheism will prevail accordingly. The Gods are contingent on style.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“We once had a divine hemisphere, a hemisphere that linked us to the heavens. As the left hemisphere became more and more powerful, it suppressed the right hemisphere and the gods fell silent and finally departed. They abandoned us, humanity said. In fact, we abandoned them. Humanity has still not recovered from their loss. We disconnected ourselves from the numinous order and became mundane. We elevated he profane over the sacred and became hollow, empty and soulless. The world is miserable. Just look around you. Just look at yourself.”
― Steve Madison, When the Universe Spoke to Humanity: Humanity Before the Fall

“Homer was a true poet. He made the gods ridiculous.”
― Marty Rubin

“For the Greeks, an atheos was, above all, someone who is abandoned by the gods, not someone who refuses to believe in them...”
― Roberto Calasso