Deus Ex Machina Quotes

God of the gaps" Christianity seeks to present Christianity as playing a strong savior role whereby it fills the gaps and provides the missing links for all of society's questions and concerns. This entails the view of God riding into town and miraculously saving the day (deus ex machina). On this view, God delivers his people from their (and his) enemies - in Bonhoeffer's case, the Nazis. In contrast, in Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer writes that God allows us to push him out of the world and onto the cross. ~ Paul Louis Metzger

Readers tend to tolerate such "accidents" ... when they get the characters into trouble but they're less accepting when the author uses them to rescue people. The "deus ex machina" ... in one stroke it renders meaningless all the efforts of the cast. ~ Thomas McCormack

It's the next phase of authorship of this country's energy future. It's gonna come from the people. It's not gonna be deus ex machina or Obama ex machina, or science ex machina. It's gonna be the people. It's not going to be a wind energy company that comes in and saves the day. It's going to be the people who figure this out. ~ Josh Fox

The ship did not respond to queries. Without the ship, there could be no fatline relay to the Ousters, the Web, or anywhere else beyond Hyperion. Normal comm bands were down. 'Could the ship have been destroyed?' Sol asked the Consul. 'No. The message is being received, just not responded to. Gladstone still has the ship in quarantine.' Sol squinted out over the barrens to where the mountains shimmered in the heat haze. Several klicks closer, the ruins of the City of Poets rose jaggedly against the skyline. 'Just as well,' he said. 'We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.' Paul ~ Dan Simmons

Nothing is more frustrating than sitting in an office amid typewriters and mimeographers when you know what deus ex machina means. ~ Florence King

A bunch of different people appear, and they've got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it's basically impossible for everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple – a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. "You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while." Like that. He's kind of a fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this 'deus ex machina. ~ Haruki Murakami

Looking on the bright side, let us remind ourselves of what has happened in the wake of earlier demystifications. We find no diminution of wonder; on the contrary, we find deeper beauties and more dazzling visions of the complexity of the universe than the protectors of mystery ever conceived. The 'magic' of earlier visions was, for the most part, a cover-up for frank failures of imagination, a boring dodge enshrined in the concept of a deus ex machina. Fiery gods driving golden chariots across the skies are simpleminded comic-book fare compared to the ravishing strangeness of contemporary cosmology, and the recursive intricacies of the reproductive machinery of DNA make élan vital about as interesting as Superman's dread Kryptonite. When we understand consciousness - when there is no more mystery - consciousness will be different, but there will still be beauty, and more room than ever for awe. ~ Daniel C. Dennett

[Stoner] said you don't kill two women and just stop there. I disagreed. I told Bill he was unduly tied to cop empiricism. I said the San Gabriel Valley was this deus ex machina. The people who flocked there flocked there for unconscious reasons that superseded conscious application of logic and made anything possible. The region defined the crime. The region was the crime ... The region explained it all. The unconscious San Gabriel Valley migration explained every absurd and murderous act that went down there. Our job was to pin point three people within that migration. ~ James Ellroy

But think about it -what if there were a deus ex machina in real life? Everything would be so easy! If you felt stuck or trapped, some god would swing down from up there and solve all your problems. What could be easier than that? ~ Haruki Murakami

If you could be any character on The Next Generation, who would you be?"
"Easy," Solomon said. "Data. For sure."
"That makes sense," Clark said.
"You?"
"I always liked Wesley Crusher."
"What?" Solomon was appalled. "Nobody likes Wesley Crusher."
"Why not?" Lisa asked.
"Because he's a total Mary Sue," Solomon said. "He's too perfect."
"But he's always saving the day," Clark argued. "Like, always."
"Exactly. He's just a talking deus ex machina. Everybody on the ship treats him like a dumb kid, then he saves them at the last minute and, every single time, they go right back to treating him like a dumb kid again. Do I need to remind you that the starship Enterprise is full of genius scientists and engineers? Why's this kid who can't get into Starfleet Academy smarter than all of them?"
"Good point," Clark said. "He's still my choice, though. ~ John Corey Whaley

Let us end this farce, observer! Give me your final, most beloved act of "will"... The one you most wish to believe was your own idea!
"My own... will... I... I believe that this love for Yukiteru-kun... is real! ~ Sakae Esuno

The suspicion that something is structurally wrong with the vision of homo faber is common to a growing minority in capitalist, communist, and "underdeveloped" countries alike. This suspicion is the shared characteristic of a new elite. To it belong people of all classes, incomes, faiths, and civilizations. They have become wary of the myths of the majority: of scientific utopias, of ideological diabolism, and of the expectation of the distribution of goods and services with some degree of equality. They share with the majority the awareness that most new policies adopted by broad consensus consistently lead to results which are glaringly opposed to their stated aims. Yet whereas the Promethean majority of would-be spacemen still evades the structural issue, the emergent minority is critical of the scientific deus ex machina, the ideological panacea, and the hunt for devils and witches. This minority begins to formulate its suspicion that our constant deceptions tie us to contemporary institutions as the chains bound Prometheus to his rock. Hopeful trust and classical irony must conspire to expose the Promethean fallacy. ~ Ivan Illich

If novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of lfe's possibilities, this is what they'd do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending; End of the World Ending; Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque Ending; Surrealist Ending; and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn't select. ~ Julian Barnes

Though she were another person, a deus ex machina ~ Danielle Steel

I need some kind of ... like ... last minute, poorly-set-up deus ex machina!! ~ Bryan Lee O'Malley

Dewan ex machina ~ Gail Carriger

It's cool because I think 'Ex Machina' is a little bit under the radar, which is always when I do my best work - when I feel like no one's paying attention. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others' stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The challenge is not to act automatically. It's to find an action that is not automatic. From painting, to breathing, to talking, to fucking. To falling in love ... ~ Alex Garland

Who we are is but a stepping stone to what we can become. ~ Deus Ex

Indeed, many movies about artificial intelligence are so divorced from scientific reality that one suspects they are just allegories of completely different concerns. Thus the 2015 movie Ex Machina seems to be about an AI expert who falls in love with a female robot only to be duped and manipulated by her. But in reality, this is not a movie about the human fear of intelligent robots. It is a movie about the male fear of intelligent women, and in particular the fear that female liberation might lead to female domination. Whenever you see a movie about an AI in which the AI is female and the scientist is male, it's probably a movie about feminism rather than cybernetics. For why on earth would an AI have a sexual or a gender identity? Sex is a characteristic of organic multicellular beings. What can it possibly mean for a non-organic cybernetic being? ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The antagonists of finance's future, the diaboli ex machina, may have no face at all. ~ Usman W. Chohan

Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all
a backdrop for the stories we must tell. ~ Kate Atkinson

I remember on Deus Ex there was one programmer - Alex Durand, a guy who still works for us - he decided he was going to get through the game without ever using a weapon. I would never think to do that. And that's fine. ~ Warren Spector

I remember having some problems with [the Deus Ex theme] when I first heard it and I was trying to figure out how to tell [Alex Brandon] I wanted changes. But then I noticed that I couldn't get it out of my mind. I was whistling or humming it to myself all the time. So I just kept my mouth shut and let it be. I think it's a highly addictive tune ~ Warren Spector

I conceived the original 'Deus Ex' and was the project director on the game. ~ Warren Spector

We have entered the Age of Light. The ages of steam and coal are long gone. With oil clinging to power, light is emerging as our deus ex machine. Light goes where nothing else can, gets there faster than anything else could, and brings back the images. If there are limits to light, other than its cosmic speed limit, we have not tested them. If there is a final answer to the question "What is light?" we have not found it. ~ Bruce Watson

We talked about our IPO like it was dues ex machina coming down from high to save us ~ Anna Wiener

Impulse. Response. Fluid. Imperfect. Patterned. Chaotic. ~ Alex Garland

There will be a machina mundi whose centre, so to speak, is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere, for God is its circumference and centre and He is everywhere and nowhere. ~ Nicholas Of Cusa

Who dreamt
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame ~ Allen Ginsberg

Evil" read backwards is "live." Demon est deus inversus. ~ Alan W. Watts

My name is Ferrum. I was the first, born of the forges, when mankind first began to experiment with iron. I rose from their imagination, from their ambition to conquer the world with a metal that could slice through bronze like paper. I was there when the world started to shift, when humans took their first steps out of the Dark Ages into civilization. For many years, I thought I was alone. But mankind is never satisfied. Others came, risen from these dreams of a new world ... Then, with the invention of computers, the gremlins came, and the bugs. Given life by the fear of monsters lurking in machines, these were more chaotic than the other fey, violent and destructive. They spread to every part of the world. As technology became a driving force in every country, powerful new fey rose into existence. Virus. Glitch. And Machina, the most powerful of all. ~ Julie Kagawa

My sincere thanks to friends and family, especially my mother, father, brother, and Mandy, who continue to love and support me despite my obsessions. ~ Jonathan Ball

O Deus Ego Amo Te

Oh God, I love Thee mightily,
Not only for Thy saving me,
Nor yet because who love not Thee
Must burn throughout eternity.
Thou, Thou, my Jesu, once didst me
Embrace upon the bitter Tree.
For me the nails, the soldier's spear,
With injury and insult, bear-
In pain all pain exceeding,
In sweating and in bleeding,
Yea, very death, and that for me
A sinner all unheeding!
O Jesu, should I not love Thee
Who thus hast dealt so lovingly-
Not hoping some reward to see,
Nor lest I my damnation be;
But as Thyself hast loved me,
So love I now and always Thee,
Because my King alone Thou art,
Because, O God, mine own Thou art! ~ Robert Hugh Benson

Is it not lack of faith that leads men to fear the scrutiny of reason? If the destination is doubtful, than the path must be fraught with fear. A robust faith need not fear, for if God exists, then reason cannot help but lead us to Him. Cogito, ergo Deus est,'says St. Augustine, I think, therefore God is. ~ Donna Woolfolk Cross

We do not have to look about us very far or for very long to realize the disastrous effects produced on the inner life of man by this age of noise. Spun about in the whirl of business, enslaved to countless technical inventions, man is severed from God and from the world of the spirit. Non in commotione Deus: God does not dwell in turbulence. To find him, there must be calm within; certain senses must be hushed. Tossed around as we are, if God wishes to speak to us, his voice, small and still, will be lost in the hubbub of our daily lives; the rackets and noise drowning our minds will prevent his penetration into that seclusion we call "heart"–the living witness of that life in us which is most sacred and most true: the life we call "inner" or "spiritual. ~ Jean Déchanet

Don't tell me you're guarding the pearly gates. You never struck me as the angelic type.
(Meghan to Machina) ~ Julie Kagawa

Through countless births in the cycle of existence
I have run, not finding
although seeking the builder of this house;
and again and again I faced the suffering of new birth.
Oh housebuilder! Now you are seen.
You shall not build a house again for me.
All your beams are broken,
the ridgepole is shattered.
The mind has become freed from conditioning:
the end of craving has been reached. ~ Gautama Buddha

This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom - we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

I made the same mistake that people have been making since the beginning of time, thinking that you can change yourself just by going somewhere else. Meu Deus, I sound like a self-help book. ~ Luiza Sauma

The custom to put others in the line of fire is a recurring theme in Judaism. It boils down to the Levite Korahites' willingness to sacrifice their ordinary Jewish subjects in order to ensure their own survival. This should be a historic warning to modern-day Israelites: their orthodox government would not hesitate to risk the lives of the many for the sake of the survival of the few in the orthodox elite. The citizens of Israel will have to think about how to remove the systemic threat that comes from within their own ranks. ~ A.J. Deus

The stars beckoned. And she had to go. ~ Aleks Canard

Let me put it this way, my father believed in a righteous God. Deus volt, that was his motto- 'because God wills it.' It was the Crusaders' motto, and they went into battle and were slaughtered just like my father. And when I saw him lying dead in a pool of his own blood, I knew then that I hadn't stopped believing in God. I'd just stopped believing God cared. There might be a God, Clary, and there might not, but I don't think it matters. Either way we're on our own. ~ Cassandra Clare

A bullet is worth a thousand threats. And I shot two. ~ Aleks Canard

He quirked a brow. "What the hell are you playing at, anyway?"
She lifted her chin. "Camouflage."
"Deus, woman." His gaze raked down her body. They were in a bar full of shifters one inch away from a full-out brawl, but damn if that hot, dark look didn't send a thrill shooting straight to her womb. "If that's camouflage, then I'm king of the faeries. ~ Rebecca Rivard

Darkness was all they knew, and eventually they thought it was the light. ~ A.J. Deus

Mass delusions bear consequences.
They lead to mass graves. ~ A.J. Deus

As Augustine says, God is at once both nearer than what is inmost to me and beyond what is highest in me. We can say all of this with some confidence merely because we can observe the divine simplicity's plural expressions and effects in contingent things, and from those abstract toward the reality of their unconditioned source. But, in the end, how that simplicity might be "modulated" within itself is strictly unimaginable for us. At that uncrossable intellectual threshold, religions fall back upon inscrutable doctrines, philosophers upon inadequate concepts, and mystics upon silence. "Si comprehendis, non est deus," as Augustine says: If you comprehend it, it is not God. ~ David Bentley Hart

That is the answer to the question which is always being asked: why has
the revolutionary movement identified itself with materialism rather than with idealism? Because to
conquer God, to make Him a slave, amounts to abolishing the transcendence that kept the former masters
in power and to preparing, with the ascendancy of the new tyrants, the advent of the man-king. When
poverty is abolished, when the contradictions of history are resolved, "the real god, the human god, will
be the State." Then homo homini lupus becomes homo homini deus. This concept is at the root of the
contemporary world. ~ Albert Camus

Feuerbach ... recognizes ... "even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God's sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only." Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man's sake, or for morality's sake, for Man's sake, and so-for homo homini Deus-for God's sake? ~ Max Stirner

The art of seduction should be from within yourself, not from your outer appearance. If whoever you're doing this for doesn't realize that... then, honey, you're seducing the wrong person. ~ XxSkemoxx183