Anthropomorphic Quotes

A horse walks into a bar, and the barman says "Why the long face?". The horse replies: "I'm deeply troubled by the anthropomorphic aspects of my existence and the extent to which I am now protected by law." ~ Bill Bailey

We are," he thought to himself, "becoming anthropomorphic a little rapidly. We shall be asking the Stone what it would like for breakfast next." . . . Now that we know we create gods, do not let us hesitate in the work." He blinked inwardly at the phrase and proceeded. "But I have promised to believe in God, and here is a temptation to infidelity already, since I know that any god in whom I can believe will be consonant with my mind. So if I believe it must be in a god consonant with me. This would seem to limit God vary considerably. ~ Charles Williams

I know this is all moronically anthropomorphic, but sometimes that is the form love takes. ~ Sigrid Nunez

It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in Nature and in the world of though. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. ~ Albert Einstein

Trees are anthropomorphic.
They stand still and enjoy the absence of movement.
But their power and strength deeply rooted
Inside the earth.
They inspire me to meditate. ~ Mehak Vijay

There is a misconception, geocentric and anthropomorphic, common to the large majority the the earthbound, which causes them to visualize a planetary system stereoscopically. The mind's eye sees a sun, remote from a backdrop of stars, and surrounded by spinning apples
the planets. Step out on your balcony and look. Can you tell the planets from the stars? Venus you may pick out with ease, but could you tell it from Canopus, if you had not previously been introduced? That little red speck
is it Mars, or is it Antares? Blast for Antares, believing it to be a planet, and you will never live to have grandchildren. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I will never come around to the idea of an anthropomorphic God. I'm also uncomfortable with the word 'God' ... I'm agnostic about the answer and I'm agnostic about the question. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

If we do not objectify, and feel instinctively and permanently that words are not the things spoken about, then we could not speak abouth such meaningless subjects as the 'beginning' or the 'end' of time. But, if we are semantically disturbed and objectify, then, of course, since objects have a beginning and an end, so also would 'time' have a 'beggining' and an 'end'. In such pathological fancies the universe must have a 'beginning in time' and so must have been made., and all of our old anthropomorphic and objectified mythologies follow, including the older theories of entropy in physics. But, if 'time' is only a human form of representation and not an object, the universe has no 'beginning in time' and no 'end in time'; in other words, the universe is 'time'-less. The moment we realize, feel permanently, and utilize these realizations and feelings that words are not things, then only do we acquire the semantic freedom to use different forms of representation. We can fit better their structure to the facts at hand, become better adjusted to these facts which are not words, and so evaluate properly m.o (multi-ordinal) realities, which evaluation is important for sanity. ~ Alfred Korzybski

Clemmons: I was wondering if I could have a word
Logan: Anthropomorphic. All yours big guy. ~ Logan Echolls

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.) ~ A.S. Byatt

Science, which is only another name for truth, now holds religious charlatans, self-deceivers and God agents in a certain degree of check
agents and employees, I mean, of a mythical, medieval, man-made God, anthropomorphic in constitution. ~ Luther Burbank

It is the tendency of the so-called primitive mind to animate its environment. Modern depth psychology has requested us for years to withdraw these anthropomorphic projections from what is actually inanimate reality, to introject -- that is, to bring back into our own heads -- the living quality which we, in ignorance, cast out onto the inert things surrounding us. Such introjection is said to be the mark of true maturity in the individual, and the authentic mark of civilization in contrast to mere social culture, such as one find in a tribe. A native of Africa is said to view his surroundings as pulsing with a purpose, a life, which is actually within himself; once these childish projections are withdrawn, he sees that the world is dead, and that life resides solely within himself. When he reaches this sophisticated point he is said to be either mature or sane... ~ Philip K. Dick

I cannot then believe in this concept of an anthropomorphic God who has the powers of interfering with these natural laws. As I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science. ~ Albert Einstein

As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: "Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B." ~ Devendra Banhart

There's nothing wrong with being anthropomorphic. That's how we understand the world. ~ Natalie Jeremijenko

For a while, I decided to worship God. It was a God I arrived at through a method of logical deduction. If there is a God, what would he be like? I asked. He would be a real person in my life, I reasoned, adhering to a literally anthropomorphic view of the sacred. He would be beautiful and I would desire him. Since a friend of mine named Trevor had all those attributes, I concluded that Trev was God. Having settled on him, I then further deduced God's other characteristics from Trevor's behaviour. He was narcissistic, perplexed, rather dispassionate, flawed in various ways, etc. So was God. At night I prayed to him by name. My entreaties seemed about as effective as other people's prayers to their Gods. And with Trevor there was the added advantage that if my prayers failed to reach him, I could always phone. ~ Stan Persky

It was this motley band of modest peeps and plovers on the beach who reminded me of the human beings I loved best - the ones who didn't fit in. These birds may or may not have been capable of emotion, but the way they looked, beleaguered there, few in number, my outcast friends, was how I felt. I'd been told that it was bad to anthropomorphize, but I could no longer remember why. It was, in any case, anthropomorphic only to see yourself in other species, not to see them in yourself. To be hungry all the time, to be mad for sex, to not believe in global warming, to be shortsighted, to live without thought of your grandchildren, to spend half your life on personal grooming, to be perpetually on guard, to be compulsive, to be habit-bound, to be avid, to be unimpressed with humanity, to prefer your own kind: these were all ways of being like a bird. Later in the evening, in posh, necropolitan Naples, on a sidewalk outside a hotel whose elevator doors were decorated with huge blowups of cute children and the monosyllabic injunction SMILE, I spotted two disaffected teenagers, two little chicks, in full Goth plumage, and I wished that I could introduce them to the brownish-gray misfits on the beach. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Nature is not anthropomorphic. ~ Laozi

There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions. ~ Stan Sakai

The use of anthropomorphic terminology forces you linguistically to adopt an operational view. And it makes it practically impossible to argue about programs independently of their being executed. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

We worship a mysterious not an anthropomorphic God. ~ Frances M. Young

Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. ~ Tom Hiddleston

Next to her a calico cat puffed away at a hubble-bubble. Puss's watch cost more than his vest, and his vest cost more than his boots, and his boots cost more than a house. If you stripped him naked and sold off his costume, you'd walk away with enough money to retire - though if you left him alive you wouldn't have long to enjoy it. The only thing that could rival Puss's vanity was his sadism. ~ Daniel Polansky

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. ~ Albert Einstein

An important advance in the life of a people is the transformation of the religion of fear into the moral religion. But one must avoid the prejudice that regards the religions of primitive peoples as pure fear religions and those of the civilized races as pure moral religions. All are mixed forms, though the moral element predominates in the higher levels of social life. Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of the idea of God. ~ Albert Einstein

For the anthropomorphic view of the rat, American psychology substituted a rattomorphic view of man. - Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation ~ Alfie Kohn

The wild gods live with the wild plants. Once, all of our gods were plants and animals. The allies are the ancient gods, their wisdom is the ancient substrate of our volition; they are the maternal transmitters of our vision and dreams. Anthropomorphic gods were the children of the plant gods. That is why destroying wild habitat is parricide, because the gods cannot live without their habitat, and it was the gods that made us, and gave us our culture. ~ Dale Pendell

This so-called animisn that not so much the Fan Nannies but everybody else around here subscribes to. can we really just write it off as primitive superstition run amok? Do only human beings have souls, or is that a narcissistic, chauvinistic piece of self-flattery? I mean, can't we look at that great old teak tree over there or at this gulch, and see as much of the divine in them as in some ol' anthropomorphic Sunday school Boom Daddy with imaginary long gray whiskers and a platinum bathrobe? Are we capable of entertaining the possibility that there may have been a holy entity in the cross as well as on it? ~ Tom Robbins

As the track bends north-east, the ethereal sandstone disappears. The slopes turn black with granite, and the mountain's lower ridges break into unstable spikes and revetments. Their ribs are slashed in chiaroscuro, and their last outcrops pour towards the valley in the fluid, anthropomorphic shapes that pilgrims love. The spine and haunches of a massive stone beast, gazing at Kailas, are hailed as the Nandi bull, holy to Shiva; another rock has become the votive cake of Padmasambhava. ~ Colin Thubron

In the Orient the ultimate divine mystery is sought beyond all human categories of thought and feeling, beyond names and forms, and absolutely beyond any such concept as of a merciful or wrathful personality, chooser of one people over another, comforter of folk who pray, and destroyer of those who do not. Such anthropomorphic attributions of human sentiments and thoughts to a mystery beyond thought is - from the point of view of Indian thought - a style of religion for children. Whereas the final sense of all adult teaching is to the point that the mystery transcendent of categories, names and forms, sentiments and thought, is to be realized as the ground of one's own very being. ~ Joseph Campbell

I think [the design] sucks. Its shape is not innovative, it's not elegant and it doesn't feel anthropomorphic. ~ Steve Jobs

Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will. The world has lost its humane dimension and reacquired the factual necessity and fatefulness which were characteristic of primitive times. But while the chaos of the barbarian was constantly ordered in the name of mysterious, anthropomorphic gods, today only man's planning can be given as a reason for the world being as it is. Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners. ~ Ivan Illich

In universal pantheism, religion is seen as a system of reverent behavior toward the Earth rather than subscription to a particular creed. Because Pantheists identify God with Nature rather than an anthropomorphic being, Pantheists oppose the arrogant world-view of anthropocentrism. ~ Harold W. Wood Jr.

It's in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It's the everyday stuff of everyman's life, but it's writ large, and we love it. ~ Tom Hiddleston

I took care to replace the Compendium in its correct pamphlet, and in doing so dislodged a slim pamphlet by Grastrom, one of the most eccentric authors in Solarist literature. I had read the pamphlet, which was dictated by the urge to understand what lies beyond the individual, man, and the human species. It was the abstract, acidulous work of an autodidact who had previously made a series of unusual contributions to various marginal and rarefied branches of quantum physics. In this fifteen-page booklet (his magnum opus!), Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us. He pointed out correspondences with the human body-the projections of our sense, the structure of our physical organization, and the physiological limitations of man-in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories. Grastrom's conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be any question of 'contact' between mankind and any nonhuman civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and scornful, victorious silence could be felt between every line, at any rate such had been my own impression. It was Gibarian who drew it to my attention, ~ Stanisław Lem

So far as I personally am concerned I had better state that I feel as little entitled to assert as to deny the existence of what others call God, for I must admit that I just do not know what this word is supposed to mean. I certainly reject every anthropomorphic, personal or animistic interpretation of the term, interpretations through which many people succeed in giving it a meaning. The conception of a man-like or mind-like acting being appears to me rather the product of an arrogant overestimation of the capacities of a man-like mind. [...]
I long hesitated whether to insert this personal note here, but ultimately decided to do so because support by a professed agnostic may help religious people more unhesitatingly to pursue that conclusions that we do share. Perhaps what many people mean in speaking of God is just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive. ~ Friedrich A. Hayek

If by believing you mean praying to an anthropomorphic deity who created the world and half controls it and half observes it, then I am probably not a believer. But if you mean that it is not all accidental, that there is a mystery to existence, a deeper meaning, that I do believe in. ~ Vaclav Havel

People will say we're being a little bit anthropomorphic?' I remembered Brendan's use of the word - 'human-like'.

'Anyone who doesn't believe that animals are aware that they have family and friends, and care about them, must also be a paid-up member of the Flat Earth Society, or still think the sun revolves around the earth,' replied Dylan disdainfully. 'I mean, how switched off can you be? How can anyone still believe animals don't have emotions? They're alive and emotions are a response to life. I've seen warthogs that are more intelligent and more responsible than some people I know. Not to say better parents. ~ Lawrence Anthony

If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity. ~ Arthur Koestler

the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman notes that "probably the most remarkable difference of all" in disparate passages "is their different ways of picturing God." Some depict "a deity who can regret things that he has done ([Gen.] 6:6, 7), . . . a deity who can be 'grieved to his heart' (6:6). . . . This anthropomorphic quality . . . is virtually entirely lacking in other passages. ~ Terryl L. Givens

But, as we have seen, movement does not require a mover, and modern quantum mechanics has shown that not all effects require a cause. And even if they did, why would the Prime Mover need to be a supernatural anthropomorphic deity such as the Judeo - Christian God? Why could it not just as well be the material universe itself? ~ Victor J. Stenger

This is a story about memory. And this much can be remembered ...
... that the Death of the Discworld, for reasons of his own, once rescued a baby girl and took her to his home between the dimensions. He let her grow to become sixteen because he believed that older children were easier to deal with than younger children, and this shows that you can be an immortal anthropomorphic personification and still get things, as it were, dead wrong. ~ Terry Pratchett

That penetrating gaze, that intelligence; it's hard not to be anthropomorphic when you're looking at a great ape - at any primate - but especially with gorillas. They're just so magnificent. ~ K.A. Applegate

The two old friends stood silently in the fading light, though you wouldn't have known it to look at them. That they were old friends, I mean. Anyone could see it was getting dark. ~ Daniel Polansky

The Lion King? It's just a kid's film.

Just a kid's film?!? Yeah, just a kid's film with an IMDB rating of 8.5, 2 Academy Awards and 2 Golden Globes, that's been adapted into THE most successful West-end musical of all time, generating a gross profit of 8 million pounds and counting. "But maybe it's just a kid's film because it doesn't deal with any mature films" said fucking nobody ever. The Lion King is the greatest anthropomorphic assault upon the theme of mortality that Western culture has ever produced. It is so complex that your tiny, shriveled, and scrotum of a brain wouldn't dare to fathom it. So no, it is not just a kid's film, it is Shakespear with fur! ~ Jack Whitehall

You can't afford anthropomorphic biases when some of the aliens most like us would rather make human hamburgers than peace. ~ John Scalzi

The taxi driver is someone who spends all day driving in city traffic (an activity that provokes either heart attack or delirium), in constant conflict with other human drivers. Consequently, he is nervous and hates every anthropomorphic creature. ~ Umberto Eco

What the mysterious is I do not know. I do not call it God because God has come to mean much that I do not believe in. I find myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me. Any idea of a personal God seems very odd to me. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

God, I've just figured out what's missing – you ditched the hallowed Albermarle Teddy Bear!'

I nodded. 'Banished to a dark cupboard for all eternity.'

'You cold-hearted bastard.'

'Give me a hot water bottle any day. At least they have some appreciable function. Not like that pathetic pile of overpriced fake fur and anthropomorphic bullshit I locked in the wardrobe.'

'You have serious teddy bear issues. ~ Tabitha McGowan

What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later ... They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are within that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic gods they replaced. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

The only practical effect of having a soul is that it fills man with anthropomorphic and anthropocentric vanities - in brief, with the cocky superstitions that make him disgusting. ~ H.L. Mencken