#idolatry

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

One must love God first, and only then can one love one's closest of kin and neighbors. We must not be idols to one another, for such is not the will of God. ↗

— Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

#eastern-orthodoxy #family #god #idolatry #love

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

There is a danger in monotheism, and it's called idolatry. And we know the prophets of Israel were very, very concerned about idolatry, the worship of a human expression of the divine. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#called #concerned #danger #divine #expression

What I find interesting is that the people that follow your Twitters are called 'followers.' Talk about false idolatry, right? ↗

— Emilio Estevez

#called #false #find #follow #followers

When people say, "I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself," they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God's. ↗

— Timothy Keller

#forgiveness

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

Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. ↗

— George Eliot

#love #work #life