"Deity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first responded, picking up a twig that opportunely dropped at his feet, and getting out his knife to whittle it, "I suppose they were the first agnostics, and we who don't so much deny the Deity as ignore Him——" ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... then, criticism is not to be judged by the help it gives to artists. One might as well suppose that philosophy was to be judged by the help it gives to the Deity. The philosopher does not tell the Deity how He ought to have made the universe; nor do we read philosophy for the sake of the judgments at which philosophers arrive. We do not want to know Kant's opinion because he is Kant; what interests us is the process by which he arrives at that ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... made you all prisoners, or sacrificed you all justly to the offended laws of my country. I could have overpowered you with my armed warriors at Caxamarca. But I failed in my duty to my people in receiving you as friends. You have robbed me of my kingdom and compelled me to insult my Deity, by stripping his ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... to the ancients (to the Greeks and Romans, for instance), it meant nothing of the kind. A religion was simply a cultus, a threskeia, a mode of ritual worship, in which there might be two differences, namely: 1. As to the particular deity who furnished the motive to the worship; 2. As to the ceremonial, or mode of conducting the worship. But in no case was there so much as a pretence of communicating any religious truths, far less any moral truths. The obstinate error rooted in modern minds is, that, doubtless, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Minds convert, what they imperfectly understand into Notions that perplex and confound them. Hence it proceeds that in common Conversation one hears People speak of Nature as of a Being, or a Kind of subordinate Deity, whereas in Reality the true Meaning of Nature is, that Order or Law which God has established in the Universe, and the Knowledge of Nature is no more than the Light we acquire by Study into the Connexion of those Laws. In this Sense Experience is a Kind of Revelation, that is to ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... airy reply. "From that deity came also meekness, an unshakable belief in human nature, and ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely 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 of his mystery, we find, in him one thought, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... physical pleasure, by means of sounds! But one might say that the cynical and cunning Creator wished to prohibit man from ever ennobling and idealizing his commerce with women. Nevertheless, man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has ornamented it so much with literary poetry, that woman often forgets the contact she is obliged to submit to. Those among us who are powerless to deceive themselves, have invented vice and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... maintaining among themselves, usually abandoned the moment they came into contact with the systematic craft and disdain of honesty, which made the character of the ferocious, yet wily, South. With these qualities he combined, indeed, the softer passions of his countrymen,—he adored Beauty, and he made a deity of Love. ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... acquiesced. Edwin smiled an enraptured assent, and Wallace, with many a gracious look and speech, disengaged himself from the clinging embraces of the weaker part of the garrison, who, seeing in him the spring of their husband's might and the guard of their own safety, clung to him as to a presiding deity. ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... this time rescued the people from oppression was Wu-wang, the martial king. He found, it is said, the people "hanging with their heads downward" and set them on their feet. On the eve of the decisive battle he harangued his troops, appealing to the Deity as the arbiter, and expressing confidence in the result. "The tyrant," he said, "has ten myriads of soldiers, and I have but one myriad. His soldiers, however, have ten myriads of hearts, while my ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... that Soul, in consequence of the latter pervading and entering into everything, then divested of desire as the Supreme Soul is, where is the possibility of its action (action or work being the direct consequence of desire)? If it is answered that the universe is the Deity's lila (mere sport, as some schools of philosophy assert), then, as every sport is ascribable to some motive of happiness, what can be the happiness of the Deity, who, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... formed to yourself an exaggerated idea of God?" An analogous reflection would not be out of place when passing judgment on the Conference which implicitly arrogated to itself some of the highest attributes of the Deity, and thus heightened the contrast between promise and achievement. Certainly people expected much more from it than it could possibly give. But it was the delegates themselves who had aroused these expectations announcing the coming of a new epoch at their fiat. The ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... came out at night. But she was so greatly shocked at the immoralities which she saw going on out of doors among the grass, that she exchanged with the male luminary, who, being a man, did not care so much. So now the sun is a female deity, and the moon is a male deity. But surely the sun must be often shocked at what she sees going on even in the day-time, when the young people are in the open among the grass.—(Written down from memory. Told ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... other people on his side or the other think, than of the widest and highest of the ideas on which a conservative philosophy of life and human society reposes. Such ideas are these,—that the social union is the express creation and ordering of the Deity: that its movements follow his mysterious and fixed dispensation: that the church and the state are convertible terms, and each citizen of the latter is an incorporated member of the former: that conscience, if perversely and misguidedly ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... and to me owe All his deliverance, and to none but me. Some I have chosen of peculiar grace, Elect above the rest; so is my will: The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warn'd Their sinful state, and to appease betimes The incensed Deity, while offer'd grace Invites; for I will clear their senses dark, What may suffice, and soften stony hearts To pray, repent, and bring obedience due. To prayer, repentance, and obedience due, Though but endeavour'd with sincere intent, Mine ear shall not ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... all discords cease, And, rounded to perpetual peace, The bounteous years shall come and go Unvexed; and all humanity, Nursed to a loftier type, shall grow Like to that image undefiled, That fair reflex of Deity, Who, first, beneath the morning skies And glowing palms of paradise, A God-like man, awoke and smiled!" * * * * Like some weird strain of music, spent In one full chord, the sweet voice ceased; A faint white glow smote up the east, Like wings uplifting—and ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... us is somehow a means, we may easily see that metaphysical inquiry, though distinct from ethical, is its necessary pre-supposition. The Being or Purpose of God, the great first cause, the world as fashioned, ordered and interpenetrated by Him, and man as conditioned by and dependent upon the Deity—are postulates of the moral life and must be accepted as a basis of all ethical study. The distinction between Ethics and Philosophy did not arise at once. In early Greek speculation, almost to the time of Aristotle, Metaphysics and Morals were not separated. And even in later times, Spinoza and ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... extent, dotted with cultivation, surrounded by mountains—a wonderful prospect. Pomona, like its sister cities in this region, has a regard for the intellectual side of life, exhibited in good school-houses and public libraries. In the library of Pomona is what may be regarded as the tutelary deity of the place—the goddess Pomona, a good copy in marble of the famous statue in the Uffizi Gallery, presented to the city by the Rev. C. F. Loop. This enterprising citizen is making valuable experiments in olive culture, raising a dozen varieties in order to ascertain which is best adapted ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... characters, who made bets, and talked racing, and rode or drove fiery steeds, and who lived on, and swindled through, the noblest of all animals. Mr Mosk, a lean light-weight, who wore loud check suits, tight in the legs and short in the waist, was the presiding deity of this Inferno, and as the Ormuz to this Ahrimanes, Gabriel Pendle was the curate of the district, charged with the almost hopeless task of reforming his sporting parishioners. And all this, with considerable irony, was placed almost in the ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... paper is of the utmost importance, greater than any state paper ever made by this Government. A paper of so much importance, and involving the liberties of so many people, ought, I think, to make some reference to Deity. I do not observe anything of the kind in it." Lincoln said: "No, I overlooked it. Some reference to Deity must be inserted. Mr. Chase, won't you make a draft of what you think ought to be inserted?" Mr. Chase promised ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... gaming table, shaded his eyes from the burning sky, and calculated the gains of the past week. He was one of the many who found it easy to enrich themselves at the expense of his companion. The Greek, leaning upon his hand, and shrinking not from that sun, his nation's tutelary deity, with whose fluent light of poesy and joy and love his own veins were filled, gazed upon the broad expanse, and envied, perhaps, every wind that bent its pinions toward the shores ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... prestige of the parent. Although without an idea of a Supreme Being, the whole country bowed down to sorcery. It is a curious distinction between faith and credulity;—these savages, utterly devoid of belief in a Deity, and without a vestige of superstition, believed most devotedly that the general affairs of life and the control of the elements were in the hands of their old chief, and therefore they served him—not with ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... answers these questions affirmatively when he declares that "the task of science is to investigate what has been done, to inquire if possible how it has been done, rather than to ask what is possible for the Deity, since we can know that only by what actually exists;" and also when he extends the argument for the intervention in Nature of a creative mind to its legitimate application in the inorganic world; which, he remarks, "considered in the same light, would ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... olden days there dwelt in the Carpathian Sea a wily old deity, known by the name of Proteus, possessing the gift of prophecy, the fruits of which he ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... a great noise shortly after midnight in the apartment beneath us: our landlord's family have returned from a pilgrimage to a far-distant temple of the Goddess of Grace. (Although Madame Prune is a Shintoist, she reveres this deity, who, scandal says, watched over her youth.) A moment after, Mademoiselle Oyouki bursts into our room like a rocket, bringing, on a charming little tray, sweetmeats which have been blessed and bought at the gates of the temple yonder, on purpose for us, and which ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... spring, tiger-like, upon the object of her hatred. But the hour for the attempt upon the dwelling, and the destruction of its inhabitants, drew near. The negroes had sworn to stand by each other, and had sacrificed an infant to their deity, to propitiate him ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... and children bear it, they shudder and exclaim, "Winter is come! Cold Winter has begun his reign already!" Now, throughout New England, each hearth becomes an altar, sending up the smoke of a continued sacrifice to the immitigable deity who tyrannizes over forest, country side, and town. Wrapped in his white mantle, his staff a huge icicle, his beard and hair a wind-tossed snow-drift, he travels over the land, in the midst of the northern blast; and woe to the ...
— Snow Flakes (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... right arm resting upon an urn, while her left arm was stretched upward toward heaven, she thus resembled an inspired priestess, just receiving a message from on high, listening with ecstasy, with suppressed breath and parted lips, to the voice of the Deity, and forgetting the world in a blissful intoxication, she seemed about to take her flight ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... while circumstances are unheroic round us. We are all too apt to be the puppets of circumstances; all too apt to follow the fashion; all too apt, like so many minnows, to take our colour from the ground on which we lie, in hopes, like them, of comfortable concealment, lest the new tyrant deity, called Public Opinion, should spy us out, and, like Nebuchadnezzar of old, cast us into a burning fiery furnace—which public opinion can make very hot—for daring to worship any god or man save the will of the ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... at Dieppe alone, is a young Princess, braving all the dangers of a wild sea, re maining on the end of the jetty to direct the succor of the fishing-boats that were seeking refuge in the harbor. She seemed placed there by the Deity as a protecting angel, and the sailors who saw ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... in his volume Quests Old and New. Gnosis was not "philosophy" in the generally accepted sense of the term, or even religio-philosophy. "It was immediate knowledge of God's mysteries received from direct intercourse with the Deity—mysteries which must remain hidden from the natural man, a knowledge at the same time which exercises decided reaction on our relationship to God and also on our nature or disposition" (Reitzenstein). It was the power or gift of receiving and understanding revelation, ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... the leaping of David the King before the Ark of Jehovah, when he danced before the Lord with all his might, girt with a linen Ephod; and this, if I may hazard an opinion, was with a view to amuse a deity apt to be bored or languid, just as Nautch girls dance to this day before the idols of the Hindus, and tops are spun before Krishna to ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... and divine 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, ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... my breast inspired A strange fear, a certain daring,— Ah, I know not if, declaring This, 'tis love, for blushes rise At perceiving with surprise That at last hath come the hour, When my heart must own the power Of a deity I despise. This alone I'll say, that here Long thy hope had been fruition, But that I the disposition Of the king, my father, fear, But still hope ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... acquainted with Spanish, assured us, that zis signified not only the sun, but also the Deity. This appeared to me the more extraordinary, as among all other American nations we find distinct words for God and the sun. The Carib does not confound Tamoussicabo, the Ancient of Heaven, with veyou, the sun. Even the Peruvian, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... given as a prize to the pupils of the four grammar schools of Paris, and of those in the provinces, thereby assuring a ready sale. In this heap of trash figures the names of all the authors who, when the giant had fallen, insulted his remains and burned their incense before the new deity who took ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... Madame de Stael has asserted that "Hobbes was an Atheist and a Slave." Yet I still think that Hobbes believed, and proved, the necessary existence of a Deity, and that he loved freedom, as every sage desires it. It is now time to offer an apology for one of those great men who are the contemporaries of all ages, and, by fervent inquiry, to dissipate that traditional cloud which hangs over one of "those monuments ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... giving them a deity whom they could comprehend, and a gold and jewelled heaven in which they could take a natural interest. He interlarded his performance with the slang of the streets, the counter, and the exchange, and he said that religion ought to enter into daily life. ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... and not forward. But genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead. Man hopes. Genius creates. To create,—to create,—is the proof of a divine presence. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his;[27]—cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... did when, with wrung heart, but with submission, he bound and laid Isaac on the altar and stretched forth his hand with the knife in it to slay him. Such a representation contradicts the vulgar conceptions of a passionless, self-sufficing, icy deity, but reflection on the facts of our own experience and on the blessed secrets of our own love, leads us to believe that some shadow of loss passed across the infinite and eternal completeness of the divine nature when 'God sent ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... behalf of science, to affirm that the Divine action is never addressed to specific or differential results, but always to universal or identical ones. In short, they logically refuse to the Divine power as exhibited in Nature all personal or moral quality, as inferring on the part of Deity any possible unequal or inequitable relations to the creatures He has made; and assign to all such reputed partial exhibitions of it a purely educative, and therefore universal, bearing upon the mind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... as we drew near the shore. Leavitt's failure to appear seemed sinister and enigmatic. I began to evolve a fantastic image of him as I recalled his queer ways and his uncanny tricks of speech. It was as if we were seeking out the presiding deity of the island, who had assumed the guise of a Caliban holding unearthly sway over ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... people. The principal edifice is a pagoda built of stone, exactly ten feet square. Not fancying there could be any harm in taking such a liberty, we entered the pagoda unceremoniously, and one of our artists set to work sketching the bronze image which the natives worship as a deity, a figure not quite three inches in height; but the Hindoos were shocked at our impiety, and soon ousted the Admiral and his party. Close by was a little tank or pool of water, beautifully spangled over with the leaves and flowers ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... Paris (Hist. Angl. i, 251), ascribes the incessant turmoil of the latter part of the reign to the vengeance of the deity for ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... jolly double 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 hands, and thus silently ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... must take things into their own hands. The fatalism of the old orthodoxy is not for a people who see that things are accomplished by the human will; such people are naturally impatient with those who entreat the Deity to do for them what they can very well do for themselves. The last of the great fatalists in English literature is Mr. Thomas Hardy. He was moved by the downfall of the old settled civilisation and the purposeless, vexing ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... such simple duties again. The Nomad responded instantly and rose swiftly to hover over the pit of the fire-god. The flame had partly subsided and the ghost-shape wabbled there, changing form rapidly with darkening colors. Some weird phenomenon of nature that those brutes had set up as a deity. ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... scramble for money was universal. Drusus looked forth into the world, and saw little in it that was good. He had tried to cherish an ideal, and found fidelity to it more than difficult. His philosophy did not assure him that a real deity existed. Death ended all. Was it not better to be done with the sham of life; to drink the Lethe water, and sink into eternal, dreamless slumber? He longed unspeakably to see Cornelia face to face; ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... hath too many gods; the profane man hath none at all, unless perhaps himself be his own deity, and the world his heaven. To matter of religion his heart is a piece of dead flesh, without feeling of love, of fear, of care, or of pain from the deaf strokes of a revenging conscience. Custom of sin hath wrought this senselessness, which ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kinds of poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere literary fashions, you must suspend disagreement. We should not call By-ends By-ends now: and whether we should do better or worse nobody, as Plato says, knows but the Deity. But the best of us would be hard put to it to make By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by his conversation, and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... me." Then I said that I had the courage to speak with far greater ease and freedom to the Emperor, seeing that the Emperor was clothed as I was, and that I should seem to be speaking to a man formed like myself; this was not the case when I addressed his Holiness, in whom I beheld a far superior deity, both by reason of his ecclesiastical adornments, which shed a certain aureole about him, and at the same time because of his holiness' dignity of venerable age; all these things inspired in me more awe than the Imperial Majesty. To these ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... upon for his defence, first declared to the judges the attributes of the Deity he worshipped: that he created the vast heavens, the stars, the mountains, the rivers, and the sea; his voice spoke in the thunder, and his eye flashed in the lightning. He then dwelt on his goodness to man, especially to the Sandwich Islanders, whom he had created for the purpose of enjoying ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... rather nothing but a vague imagination. They have, it is true, a confused notion of a Being, acting they know not how [Who does?], in the universe, but they do not make of him a great soul diffused through all its parts. They have no conception or knowledge of all the attributes we bestow on the Deity. Whenever they happen to philosophize upon this Manitoo, or great spirit, they utter nothing but reveries and absurdities. [Are not there innumerable volumes on this subject, to which the same objection might as justly be made? Possibly the savages, ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... few tribes of "Mutualis." The former incline to the Christian faith, while the latter are generally termed "calf-worshippers." They practise their religion so secretly, that nothing certain is known concerning it; the general supposition is, however, that they worship their deity under the form ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... cried the high priest, lifting quivering hands on high as though about to call down the thunders of an outraged deity upon that impious head. "She who hath spoken once may deign to speak again. Harken,—hear ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... hot face up to it, she saw that it was new, and instantly felt a throb of relief that she had not caught her first glimpse of it through glass. She bowed her head to it, quickly, nine times running, and sent up a prayer to the deity of fortune that had its home there. Good luck!—the fulfilment of one's wish! She wished in haste, with tight-closed eyes—and who knew but what, the very next day, her wish might come true! Tired with crying, above all, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... theory demolishes the Deity with the greatest ease, and places man, fleeting or evanescent as he is, at the summit of the universe! As he expresses it, "The only intelligence in the universe worthy of the name is the intelligence of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... they seem to our wise age, such legends show the Northwestern Indian struggling to interpret the world about him. Like savages everywhere, he peopled the unknown with spirits good and bad, and mingled his conception of a beneficent deity with his ideas of the evil one. Symbolism pervaded his crude but very positive mind. Ever by his side the old Siwash felt the Power that dwelt on Tacoma, protecting and aiding him, or leading him to destruction. Knowing {p.040} nothing of true worship, his primitive intelligence ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... and Charles Keene, as one of the four great pillars on which would rest the artistic reputation of the paper. In that first drawing, himself and two of his friends were represented entering the "studio" of a photographer, smoking, as the manner of artists is; and they are coldly requested by the deity of the place to leave their tobacco outside, as "they are in an artist's studio" (p. 150, Vol. XXXIX.). It was a poor sketch enough, showing some straining after comicality, and lacking every trace of the grace and beauty the draughtsman was so soon to develop. He was Parisian born, and after ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... rowers. The stern or puppis, from which we derive the term poop, was elevated above the other parts of the deck, and here the helmsman had his seat, sheltered by a shed frequently adorned with an image of the tutelary deity of the vessel. Sometimes he had a lantern hanging in front of him, probably to enable him to see the magic compass, the use of which was kept secret from the rest of the crew. A circular shield or ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... was customary among the ancients for servants to receive the mark of their master, and soldiers of their general, and those who were devoted to any particular deity, of the particular deity to whom they were devoted. These marks were usually impressed on their right hand, or on their foreheads, and consisted of some hieroglyphic character, or of the name expressed in vulgar letters, or of the name disguised in numerical ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... of the young is a disposition not to yield to their belief unless it conforms to their own crude notions of propriety and reason. If the powers of man were equal to analyzing the nature of the Deity, to comprehending His being, and power, and motives, there would be some little show of sense in thus setting up the pretence of satisfying our judgments in all things, before we yield our credence to a religious system. But the first step we take brings with it the instructive ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... incongruities. We see a fish and we see a woman we can drop one half of each, and unite in idea the other two halves to a mermaid. We see a horse and we see a man; we are able to drop one half of each, and unite the other two halves to a centaur. Thus also the pictorial representations of the Deity, the bodies and wings of cherubs and seraphs, the hoofs, horns, and tail of the Evil One, the joys of the blessed, and the torments of the damned, have been elaborated from materials furnished to ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... devotion to holy wells. The custom still exists in Hindostan; people flock to them for cure of their diseases, and leave "rags" on the bushes as "scapegoats," ex votos, so to say, of cures, or prayers for cures. In India, the prayer is made to a heathen deity; in Ireland, the people happen to believe that God hears the prayers of saints more readily than their own; and acting on the principle which induced persons, in apostolic times, to use "handkerchiefs and aprons" which ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... say, they should meet with a storm and be in danger of losing their lives. Hence, doubtless, has this superstition originated; that, in these places formerly, during the time of paganism, those who worshipped their sea-deity Nekr, did so, as it were with a sacred silence, ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... thought without extension, the other by extension without thought. These two are so alien and so incongruous, that neither can influence the other, or determine the other, or any way relate with the other, except by direct mediation of Deity. (The doctrine of Occasional Causes.) This is Dualism,— that sharp and rigorous antithesis of mind and matter, which Des Cartes, if he did not originate it, was the first to develop into philosophic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... hear much of Robert Montgomery, commonly called Satan Montgomery because the author of 'Satan,' of the 'Omnipresence of the Deity,' and of various poems which pass through edition after edition, nobody knows how or why? I understand that his pew (he is a clergyman) is sown over with red rosebuds from ladies of the congregation, and that the same fair hands have ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Egyptian Gods.—The principal deity is a Sun-god, creator, beneficent, "who knows all things, who exists from the beginning." This god has a divine wife and son. All the Egyptians adored this trinity; but not all gave it the same name. Each region gave a different name to these three gods. At Memphis they called the father ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... universe, the entire universe is composed of individual centres, or monads. To these monads he ascribed numberless qualities by which every phase of nature may be accounted. They were supposed by him to be percipient, self-acting beings, not under arbitrary control of the deity, and yet God himself was the original monad from which all the rest are generated. With this conception as a basis, Leibnitz deduced his doctrine of pre-established harmony, whereby the numerous independent substances composing the world are made to form one universe. He believed that by ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... his 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... he 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 ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... waters in the caves, The royal robe of morning on thy head Abides for ever! Evermore the wind Is thy august companion; and thy peers Are cloud, and thunder, and the face sublime Of blue mid-heaven! On thy awful brow Is Deity; and in that voice of thine There is the great imperial utterance Of God for ever; and thy feet are set Where evermore, through all the days and years, There rolls the grand ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Professor, "is nothing but a continual process of thinking, without beginning and without end. Now that the evolution of ideas in the human mind is the process of all existence—the essence of the Absolute—of a Deity, so that Deity is nothing more than the Absolute ever striving to realize ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... last-named set, Ridicule being more strong and fearful a deity than she is amongst the cultivators of the graver occupations of life, reduces the inmates, by a constant dread of incurring her displeasure, to a more monotonous and regular subjection to the judgment of others. Ridicule ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... parents, however, she heard nothing to stimulate her natural tendency to religious fervour after Kitty's departure; and gradually the image of our Blessed Lady faded from her mind, and was succeeded by that of the God of her parents, a death-dealing deity, delighting in blood, whom she was warned to fear, and from whom she did accordingly shrink with such holy horror that, when she went to church, she tried to think of anything but Him. This was how it happened that church, instead of being the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the supremacy of a small number of superior beings, these, whom we may call the sovereign gods, were often figured with the heads of lions or eagles (see Fig. 8). Before any of these images had been found we already knew from Berosus what the deity was like by whom the first germs of art and letters had been sown upon the earth. "He had the whole body of a fish, but beneath his fish's head he had another head [that of a man], while human feet appeared below his fish's tail. He had also the voice of a man, and his images are yet to be found."[89] ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... who possessed both a stammer and a squint, became similarly filled with a desire to tell us something about a fish. Yet from the moment that he began his narrative everyone declined to believe it, and laughed at his broken verbiage as, frequently invoking the Deity, and cursing, and brandishing his awl, and viciously swallowing spittle, he shouted ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... became. She grew intensely antagonistic to my work, and tried in every way to have me discontinue it. She could not believe that all human beings were born to have equal rights and privileges in the world. She had been taught from infancy that there must always be a master and a servant, and that the Deity was responsible for the position held between them. She believed, as most good Christians do, that it is the Creator's will that some people are born in wealth and luxury, while others are born and bred in poverty and squalor. She repeatedly endeavored to ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... engineer was a half-breed China-Malay who had picked up his knowledge of power plants, Heaven alone knew where, and, I had reason to believe, had transferred all his religious impulses to the American built deity of mechanism he so faithfully served. The crew was made up of six huge, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... 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, however, volunteered to ask us, 'Will ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... to meet with a surprise. The chief deity worshipped by the people of the Island of Gems was a snake god, a monster who at regular, intervals visited a coral cave rising out of a pool of water said to be fathomless, from which I conjectured it was connected with the sea. The water in this pool was of a deep blue colour, salt to the taste, ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... the immortals, for love's sake, divest themselves of their godhead, so do mortals, in the ecstasy of passion, recognize in the object of their love the incarnate presence of deity. Love, like music, can raise a "mortal to the skies" and "bring an angel down." In this stanza there is, perhaps, an intentional obscurity in the confusion of ideas, which are "thrown out" for the reader to shape for himself ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... reflect, as the beautiful fabric grows beneath her forming hand, that her work, and the power and skill to plan and execute it, is an emanation of the Immortal Mind; of that Mind, whose creative powers are a faint, but legible transcript of the Omnipotent Wisdom of the Deity. This thought gives a permanency to what would, in any other light be only transitory as the summer cloud. It is Omnipotent Wisdom and Power, which has contrived and executed all the beautiful wonders of creation; and that Wisdom and Power were called into activity by Omnipotent Love. ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... under the influence of these "uninspired" literatures and cultures, became more and more important as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceased to be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendence of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance of his creatures, which inform both the Jewish-Christian Scriptures and the philosophic absolutism of the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... by the most picturesque villages with indifference, and it was only when they reached some great city, or came upon some exceptionally fine temple or eccentric deity, that their curiosity was aroused. Mendes worshipped its patron god in the form of a live ram,* and bestowed on all members of the same species some share of the veneration it lavished on the divine animal. The inhabitants of Atarbekhis,** on the island of Prosopitis, gave themselves up ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... as these had I with my man, and such made me sensible, that the true God is worshipped, tho' under imperfect similitudes; and that the false adoration which the Heathens give to their imaginary Deity, is as great an argument of the divine essence, as the most learned Atheists (falsely so called) can bring against it; for God will be glorified in his works, let their denominations be what it will; and I cannot be of that opinion ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... 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 zephyr blows, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... fact that the feeling of solidarity must be based. The miraculous simply had no existence, and that was a good thing for those who had to fight with the weapon of their own physical strength. No invisible deity sat overhead making his own plans for them or obstructing others. What one willed, that could one accomplish, if only he had strength enough to carry it through. Strength—it was on that and that alone that everything depended. And there was ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... creation vast began, And far the universal fiat ran, "Let there be light"—from chaos dark set free, Ye rose, a monument of Deity, ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... are far less analytical, and much more naive in their reference of natural happenings to the direct interposition of malevolent and benevolent spirits. Their gods are numerous as in Greek religion, and likewise one of them is usually set up as the superior deity, to be the Tirawa of the Indian, the greater Atua of Polynesia, and the Mumbo Jumbo of a West African negro. There is no centralization of the supernatural powers, as in the Jehovah of Judaism and the still subtler Brahma of the Asian. Then, too, the gods ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Callimachus to Jupiter, that the subject was too great to be properly managed by the correct and elegant genius of that writer. Instead of enlarging (as we should have naturally expected) on any particular perfection of this Supreme Deity, or even of enumerating in a poetical manner the attributes which were commonly ascribed to Him, he entertains us coldly with traditionary stories about His birth and education; and the sublime part of his subject is either wholly omitted, ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... this period for the supernatural. When we read such things recorded by men of sense and education, (and Mr. Law was deficient in neither), we cannot help remembering the times of paganism, when every scene, incident, and action, had its appropriate and presiding deity. It is indeed curious to consider what must have been the sensations of a person, who lived under this peculiar species of hallucination, believing himself beset on all hands by invisible agents; one who was unable to account for the restiveness of a nobleman's carriage horses otherwise than by ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... far the most archaic of all with which we are acquainted. Temples they had none: no images of gods, no altars of sacrifice; scarce any memorials of the dead. Their worship at best was offered in hymns to some vague, half-forgotten deity or First Maker of things, a god decrepit from age or all but careless of his children. Spirits were known and feared, but scarcely defined or described. Sympathetic magic, and perhaps a little hypnotism, ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... what is this city? I do not want to know what is to be the name of the place (for some accident,—a river or a local deity, will determine that), but what the situation is, whether maritime or inland. 'The city will be about eleven miles from the sea.' Are there harbours? 'Excellent.' And is the surrounding country self-supporting? 'Almost.' Any neighbouring states? 'No; and that is the reason for choosing ...
— Laws • Plato
... he had the same unbounded delight in a great storm as he had at the foot of Niagara, or in looking at the stars on a winter night: that it stirred in his soul all that was loftiest,—that for the time he could comprehend Deity, and that "the noise of the thundering of His waters" was an anthem that struck the highest chords of his nature. What is really sublime takes us out of ourselves, so that we have no room for personal terror, and we mingle with the elemental roar in spirit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... deity, nurse at once and sire! Thou genitor that all things nourishest! The earth was suckled at thy shining breast, And in her veins is quick thy milky fire. Who scarfed her with the morning? and who set Upon her brow the day-fall's carcanet? Who queened her front with the enrondured moon? ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... to the remarkable fact that Dyaus Pittar, the highest name of deity among the ancient Hindoos, is the exact equivalent of Zeus Pater among the Greeks, Jupiter among the Romans, and of "Our Father who art in the heavens" in the divinely taught and holiest ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... had seen of the North. There was still a wild region, far beyond any explorations I had yet made, which constantly loomed up in my imagination—the chaotic land of frost and fire, where dwelt in ancient times the mighty Thor, the mystic deity of ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... have wisht my self with ye at the old Temple of Bacchus at St. Clou, to sacrifice a Bottle and a Damsel to his Deity. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... turned toward the young captain, and there was confusion on his face. But recovering himself quickly, the Chian answered, "Why should I blush to own it? Aphrodite is no dishonourable deity to the men of the Ionian Isles. I sought the temple at that hour, as is our wont, to make my offering, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned." The truest and highest point of view from which to regard the poetry of Shelley is that which shows it as a "sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Evolutionists have not succeeded in explaining life; they have merely discovered a new law relating to life. If we must have an explanation, there is nothing for it but to accept the notion of a Deity. Indeed, how can there be religion without a divine author? Religion is based on the idea of a divine mind which reveals itself to us for moral ends. The Christian revelation, we hold, has been developed gradually, much of it in connection with secondary causes and human events. It has ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... protected a nearly bald head from the weather; below it fell a quantity of white hair which a painter would gladly have paid four francs an hour to copy,—a dazzling mass of snow, worn like that in all the classical representations of Deity. It was easy to guess from the way in which the cheeks sank in, continuing the lines of the mouth, that the toothless old fellow was more given to the bottle than the trencher. His thin white beard gave a threatening expression to his profile by the stiffness of its short ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... passed at Oxford by one leap from a state of indifferentism with regard to Christianity, into an attitude of vehement antagonism. With a view to securing answers to his missives, he printed a short abstract of Hume's and other arguments against the existence of a Deity, presented in a series of propositions, and signed with a mathematically important "Q.E.D." This document he forwarded to his proposed antagonists, expressing his inability to answer its arguments, and politely requesting them to help him. When it so ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... without knowing it, they returned, and became quite another people, whose first care it was to give permanency to this illumination amongst themselves. Soon an apostacy and idolatry among them was out of the question. For it is possible to be faithless to a national deity, but never to God, after He has ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... master in the most conservative schools, where the old ways of thinking were cherished. His ethical doctrines were especially attacked by Luther. Giordano Bruno, an Italian, not without genius, promulgated a theory of pantheism, which identified the Deity with the world. He wandered from land to land, was a vehement assailant of received religious views, and was burned at the stake at Rome (1600). In some gifted minds, the conflict of doctrinal systems, and the influence of the Renaissance, engendered ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... with the recognition that the manner is beyond our fathoming, and to accept the fact, pressed upon our faith, that our hearts may grasp it and be at peace. God hath dwelt in humanity. The everlasting Word, who is the forthcoming of all the fulness of Deity into the realm of finite creatures, was made flesh and dwelt ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... who dutifully protected the king, fraternally respected the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister, and was heartily in favor of the British Constitution. Naturally, being a devout woman, she agreed with Deity. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... is called by the tribes of Blackfeet, is the strangest character in Indian folk-lore. Sometimes he appears as a god or creator, and again as a fool, a thief, or a clown. But to the Indian, Napa is not the Deity; he occupies a somewhat subordinate position, possessing many attributes which have sometimes caused him to be confounded with Manitou, himself. In all of this there is a curious echo of the teachings of ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... little given to swindling. As for Moses, he is a myth, a form of the Indian Bacchus. The Koran (and consequently the Bible) may be judged by the ignorance of physics which it displays. "This is the touchstone of the books which, according to false religions, were written by the Deity, for God is neither absurd nor ignorant." Several volumes are devoted by Voltaire to showing the inconsistencies, absurdities and atrocities of the Old and New Testaments, and ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... enthusiasm, and asceticism; Isis and Serapis, with the ideals of communion and purification; Baal, the omnipotent dweller in the far-off heavens; Jehovah, the jealous God of the Hebrews, omniscient and omnipresent; Mithra, deity of the sun, with the Persian dualism of good and evil, and with after-death rewards and punishments—all these, and more, flowed successively into the channel of Roman life and mingled their waters to form the late Roman paganism which proved so pertinacious ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... been so in our notions of God? What has the history of theology been for near one thousand eight hundred years? Has it not been a gradual justification of God, a gradual vindication of His character from those dark and horrid notions of the Deity which were borrowed from the Pagans, and from the Jewish Rabbis? a gradual return to the perfect good news of a good God, which was preached by St. John and by St. Paul?—In one word, a gradual manifestation of God; and a gradual discovery that ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... their authority, not from the consent of the governed, but from the weapons of the conqueror; law and morality between nations have vanished. Herodotus tells us that the Scythians worshipped as their god a naked sword; that is the deity to be installed in the place once held by the God of Christianity, the God ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... language on the Athenians taken in Sicily. "They paid the penalty for their impious outrage on Hermes in mutilating his statues; and the chief agent in their destruction was one who was descended on his father's side from the injured deity—Hermocrates, son of Hermon." I wonder, my dearest Terentian, how he omitted to say of the tyrant Dionysius that for his impiety towards Zeus and Herakles he was deprived of his power by Dion ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... myself among the water-lilies that I might discover the actions of the man. And the man was tall and stately in form, and was wrapped up from his shoulders to his feet in the toga of old Rome. And the outlines of his figure were indistinct—but his features were the features of a deity; for the mantle of the night, and of the mist, and of the moon, and of the dew, had left uncovered the features of his face. And his brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and, in the few furrows upon his cheek I read the fables ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... generous and rejoicing thing an alien and awful quality: the quality of torture. Its presence is life; its touch is death. Therefore, it is always necessary to have an intermediary between ourselves and this dreadful deity; to have a priest to intercede for us with the god of life and death; to send an ambassador to the fire. That priest is the poker. Made of a material more merciless and warlike than the other instruments of domesticity, hammered on the anvil and born itself in the flame, the poker ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... attests the existence of man. Looming up in its mighty grandeur—the imperishable monument of a departed civilization, and the only one of its kind—the beholder feels that it is no unworthy rival of the works of Deity. ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... because Shelley did not repeat the ordinary creeds, and even mocked at them, that he believed nothing. Shelley was never in his soul an atheist: it was simply impossible with his nature that he should be; what he did deny and defy was a deity whose worship seemed, as he saw the world, consistent with the ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... her for an hour after their Sunday-noon dinner. She had been to church; had confessed indeterminate sins to a formless and unresponsive deity. She felt righteous, and showed it. Phil caught the cue. He sacrificed all the witty things he was prepared to say about Mrs. Gray's dumplings; he gazed silently out of the window till she wondered what he was thinking about, then he stumblingly began to review a sermon which he said he ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... to remark on such an occurrence, in the true spirit of physico-theology, that the rooks were saying their prayers; and yet this child was much too young to be aware that the scriptures have said of the Deity — that ' he feedeth the ravens who ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... were seldom members of organized churches, though the fear of the Deity, natural to those who witnessed the great "freshets" and the storms and cyclones which swept over the plains, carrying entire villages with them or cutting wide swaths through the primeval forests, was a powerful influence upon everyday conduct. Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... executed down to the detail of his ribbed stockings, and holding in his hand a ticket with the date of his demise. He looked most pitiful and ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct, like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten deity under a new dispensation; the burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the rain dripped all round him; and the world maintained the most entire indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone. In another, a vaulted tomb, handsome externally but horrible inside with damp and cobwebs, there were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conduct the largest and the most complicated concerns quite as well as solitary despots. I have never been able to see why the hypothesis of a divine syndicate should be found guilty of innate absurdity. Those Assyrians, in particular, who held Assur to be the one supreme and creative deity, to whom all the other supernal powers were subordinate, might fairly ask that the essential difference between their system and that which obtains among the great majority of their modern theological critics should be demonstrated. In my apprehension, it is not the quantity, ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... any association with Art. She reserves it for her own demesnes; and if you would possess one, you must go to its native spot and plant your garden around it, and take heed, lest, by disturbing its roots, you offend the deity who protects it. Some noble Hemlocks are occasionally seen in rude situations, where the cultivator's art has not interrupted their spontaneous growth; and the poet and the naturalist are inspired with a more pleasing admiration of their beauty, because ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... of Odin, the supreme Scandinavian deity, sat two ravens, whispering in his ears. These two ravens are called Hugin and Munin, or Thought and Memory. These "stately ravens of the saintly days of yore" flew, each day, all over the world, gathering "facts and figures," doubtless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... in the small understanding they have already gained of the wholeness of Deity, and work gradually and gently up toward the perfect thought divine. This meekness will increase their apprehension of God, because their mental struggles and pride of opinion will ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... decline answering a categorical question there. Shakespeare has got to be a kind of deity. Prudent minds, having certain latent thoughts concerning him, will reserve them in a condition of lasting probation. Still, as touching avowable speculations, we are permitted a tether. Shakespeare himself is to be adored, not arraigned; but, so we do it with humility, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... that the Being who controls completely the destiny of every person will be in the midst of those gathered in His name, to hear and answer their petitions. If this is true, then no earthly ruler was every so neglected and insulted, so generally ignored, as this very Deity to whom you ascribe unlimited power, and from whom you say you receive life and everything. An eastern despot would take off the heads of those who treated him in such a style; and a republican politician would scoff at the idea of ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... feelings of the Athenians towards their favourite deity, what must have been their horror when they awoke one morning to find that all the busts of Hermes, with one or two exceptions, were shattered and mutilated beyond all recognition. The whole population was thunderstruck, and wild rumours ran from mouth to mouth concerning ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... to war with each other in fierce selfishness, without pity, with no appeal beyond, no hope of final justice. And above us, in place of the good God of our happy youth, nothing, any more! or worse than nothing—a deity, barbarous and ironical, who cares ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... finer strokes and colours see Of the Creator's real poetry, Than when we with attention look Upon the third day's volume of the book? If we could open and intend our eye, We all like Moses should espy Even in a bush the radiant Deity. But we despise these his inferior ways Though no less full of miracle and praise; Upon the flowers of heaven we gaze, The stars of earth no wonder in us raise, Though these perhaps do more than they The life of mankind sway. Although no part of mighty Nature ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... struck me in the delivery of this short speech. One was, that the eyes of an intrepid operator filled with tears whilst he adverted to a very commonplace subject; the other, that a confirmed atheist was inconsistent enough to invoke the Deity whose very ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... vein of conventionality. He kept the opinions of the past in the matter of caste. He clung to certain political and social maxims, and could not see beyond them. He sometimes expressed them as if they were freshly discovered truths or direct emanations from the Deity of England. He belonged to a certain type of English society, and he rarely got out of it in his poetry. He inhabited a certain Park of morals, and he had no sympathy with any self-ethical life beyond ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... section, the experience must have had much influence on his whole career. (2) The second notable event of his life was his marriage. In this story there is preserved the ancient customs of his father's provision for the marriage of the son. The story also shows the overruling influence of deity in his marriage. The whole experience was calculated to show his sincere relation to God who was leading. (3) The birth of his twin sons Esau and Jacob. They were so different in type that their descendants for centuries showed a like difference ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... Some strange deity is helping the Chinese Government. There is always something appropriate to write about. Yesterday the Duke of Edinburgh died. We were officially informed to that effect, after the King Humbert manner, and the condolences were great. Yesterday, also, during ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... and, moreover that this custom is of Pagan origin. Amongst the Greeks, oaths were frequently accompanied by sacrifice; and it was the custom to lay the hands upon the victim, or upon the altar, thereby calling to witness the deity by whom the oath was sworn. So Juvenal, Sat. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... see, over the principal door of the Temple, a solid gold figure of colossal magnitude, represented as crowned with leaves and tendrils, and holding in his outstretched hands a gigantic, and doubtless symbolic, bunch of grapes. "This," I said to myself, "is evidently the tutelary deity of the place, so displayed to receive the worship of the passer-by." With the discovery a thought of the most irreproachable benevolence possessed me. "Why should not this person," I reflected, "gain the ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... she had had a terrified impulse in her meeting-going. It seemed to her that if she stayed away, Lois might be worse. Unconsciously her church attendance became a species of spell, or propitiation to a terrifying deity, and the wild instinct of the African awoke ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
