#idolatry

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#idolatry #idols #love-disappointment #love

Idolatry is really not good for anyone. Not even the idols. ↗

— John Bach

#even #good #idolatry #idols #really

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#art #idolatry #individuality #legacy #love

‎A careful reading of the Old and New Testaments shows that idolatry is nothing like the crude picture that springs to mind of a sculpture in some distant country. The idea is highly sophisticated, drawing together the complexities of motivation in individual psychology, the social environment, and also the unseen world. Idols are not just on pagan altars, but in well-educated human hearts and minds ↗

— Richard Keyes

#old-testament #richard-keyes #education

The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce. ↗

— H.W. Brands

#materialism #family

We imagine that a little anxiety and worry is an indication of how wise we really are; it may be an indication of how wicked we really are. ↗

— Oswald Chambers

#idolatry #worry #imagination

Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again. ↗

— Lionel Blue

#cracked #early #i #idolatry #open

Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain. ↗

— John Calvin

#brain #certain #forge #forsake #god

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#believed #could #curious #handling #how

I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter. ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#sin #wickedness #life