Xenophanes Quotes

Men always makes gods in their own image.

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw, And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.

No man knows distinctly anything, and no man ever will.

If an ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox.

One must be a sage to recognize a sage.

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, All things to us, but in the course of time Through seeking we may learn and know things better. But as for certain truth, no man has known it, Nor shall he know it,neither of the gods Nor yet of all the things of which I speak. For even if by chance he were to utter The final truth, he would himself not know it: For all is but a woven web of guesses

Five hundred years ago, the Greek philosopher Xenophanes wrote, ‘There is one God, always still and at rest, who moves all things with the thoughts of His mind.’ In this year, I, the philosopher Seth, mathetes of the philosopher Philo Judaeus, teaching my favorite students in Alexandria, would add, it is not that there is one God but that God is One, meaning All There Is.

For all things come from earth, and all things end by becoming earth.

Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves. Xenophanes

This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves. In the shift from party politics to television politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Senator, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent. We look at the television screen and ask, in the same voracious way as the Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?" We are inclined to vote for those whose personality, family life, and style, as imaged on the screen, give back a better answer than the Queen received. As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.

One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that.

Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature,—the unity in variety,—which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age, that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity.

The gods did riot: enrich man with a knowledge of all things from the beginning of life. Yet man seeks, and in time invents what may be better.

Are there any circumstances in which philosophy is not a power game, albeit one that it is conducted according to the most rigid rules, which are intended to direct us toward the truth? Anyone who feels confident enough to answer this question should ponder the words of Xenophanes: ‘No one knows, or will ever know, the truth about the gods and everything; for if one chanced to say the whole truth, nevertheless one would never know it.’ This accords with much twentieth-century philosophy, as it did with certain elements of Greek philosophy, and has done with skeptical philosophy through the centuries between. Yet if we cannot know the truth, the psychological argument becomes all but irresistible – he who musters the best argument wins. Fortunately we now recognise that philosophy is as much about the rules of this argument as it is about who wins.

Philosophers have always loved mathematics. It’s not hard to see why: one of the things philosophers are most interested in is knowledge. We just saw one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Xenophanes, making a contrast between really having knowledge of the truth and having mere beliefs. And if you’re looking for a nice, solid example of knowledge, mathematics is just about the best example there is. You don’t merely believe that 2 + 2 = 4, you actually know it. Or at least, this is what most people think: that mathematics is a kind of gold standard against which other supposed examples of knowledge can be measured.

In the earlier part of this essay I made the remark that Pantheism as a religion is almost entirely modern. The context, however, clearly showed what was meant; for several pages have been occupied with indications of the ideas and teaching of individual Pantheists from Xenophanes to Spinoza. But we do not usually take much note of a religion that is confined to one or two men in an age. If it dies out we treat it merely as a curiosity, or an intellectual puzzle, like the dreams of Jacob Boehme, or the atheistic ecclesiasticism of Comte. But, if it afterwards shows symptoms of unexpected adaptation to the mental and moral conditions of a newer world, and if, on account of this adaptation, it gains a hold on men who are neither philosophers nor metaphysicians, but only religious, it demands our consideration on far other grounds than those of intellectual curiosity.

In what may be the first joke in the history of philosophy, albeit a joke with a serious message, Xenophanes sarcastically remarks that if cattle or horses could depict the gods, they would show them looking like cattle or horses (§169).

The best any of us can do is to find the most plausible and appropriate beliefs. But that doesn’t stop Xenophanes from being pretty tough on people who fall short of these most plausible and appropriate beliefs, especially on a topic as important as the divine. We don’t know, maybe, that God thinks and can shake all things by thinking, but we should believe it. Whereas we sure as heck shouldn’t believe that God commits adultery.

You may call it a tradition, but it wouldn't be a tradition when old traditions were broken, by an old structure.

Ancient historians like Josephus the Jew, Berosus the Chaldean, Hieronymus the Egyptian, Mnaseas, and Nicolaus of Damascus (Josephus even mentions these last four) discussed a powerful flood that occurred in their past. Ancient Greek historians like Xenophanes, Herodotus, Eratosthenes, and Strabo all commented on fossils being from a significant water event in the past (not always to the extent of biblical proportions but they understood the point).

Xenophanes, for example, who lived some two centuries after Hesiod, held an altogether loftier view of the Creator and in a most inspiring passage sought to redress the theological balance: “Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all the things which among men are shameful and blameworthy--theft and adultery and mutual deception...[But] there is one God, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals neither in shape nor in thought ...he sees as a whole, he thinks as a whole, he hears as a whole ...Always he remains in the same state, changing not at all ...But far from toil he governs everything with his mind.”8

The pre-Socratic Xenophanes famously commented, “Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians gods with gray eyes and red hair,” and remarked, “But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.

As Xenophanes wrote:     The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, All things to us, but in the course of time, Through seeking we may learn and know things better.   This

things Are of one pattern made; bird, beast, and flower, Song, picture, form, space, thought, and character, Deceive us, seeming to be many things, And are but one. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Xenophanes

And as for certain truth, no man has seen it, nor will there ever be a man who knows about the gods and about all the things I mention. For if he succeeds to the full in saying what is completely true, he himself is nevertheless unaware of it; and Opinion (seeming) is fixed by fate upon all things.

The truth is that no man ever was or will be who understands the gods and all I speak of. If you stumble on some rocks of the whole truth you never know it. There is always speculation.

1 Man made his gods, and furnished them with his own body, voice, and garments. 2 If a horse or lion or a slow ox had agile hands for paint and sculpture, the horse would make his god a horse, the ox would sculpt an ox. 3 Our gods have flat noses and black skins say the Ethiopians. The Thracians say our gods have red hair and hazel eyes.

Whom they call Iris is also a raincloud that we see as purple, scarlet and green.

Everything comes from the earth, and everything ends in the earth.

As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.

Ancient philosophy is traditionally held to begin in the sixth century BC, in the Greek cities of coastal Asia Minor. A large number of philosophers are generally grouped as ‘Presocratics’; their activities cover the sixth and fifth centuries. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes are early cosmologists, giving ambitious accounts of the world as a whole. Pythagoras began a tradition emphasizing mysticism and authority. Heraclitus produced notoriously obscure aphorisms. Xenophanes begins a long concern with knowledge and its grounds.

Egypt from the earliest times had been the University of Greece. It had been visited, according to tradition, by Orpheus and Homer: there Solon had studied law-making: there the rules and principles of the Pythagorean order had been obtained : there Thales had taken lessons in geometry: there Democritus had laughed and Xenophanes had sneered. And now every intellectual Greek made the voyage to that country: it was regarded as a part of education, as a pilgrimage to the cradle-land of their mythology.

I am Xenophanes! I AM GOD!

Greek philosophers, however, took a considerably more critical approach to religion than anything we can find in medieval Europe. And none more so than Xenophanes.

But if horses or cattle or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they had themselves.

One day a dog was being thrashed in the street, and behold, Pythagoras, philosopher of spirits, was walking by. His heart was in his mouth for the poor pup. 'Stop! Stop!' he cried. 'Don't beat him any more. This is my dear friend's soul. I recognize the voice when I hear him bark.

There is one God, supreme among gods and men, who is like mortals in neither body nor mind.

the philosopher Xenophanes, who lived from about 570 B.C. Men have created the gods in their own image, he said.

What this popular symbolism amounts to for Herder is a new and more open view of truth: a rejection of literal and rational truth and a preference for the truth of poetry, of imagination, and of symbolism. Here Herder expresses the new Romantic view of the truth of myth: the Greeks had thought, no doubt, that myths were established traditional stories; but they must have understood that the actions of these stories could not have happened, nor their characters have actually existed. In the sixth to fifth century B.C. the Greek philosopher and poet Xenophanes had indeed objected to Homer's view of the gods on the grounds that it was both incredible and immoral; and this negative, literalistic, view of the truth of poetry, or epic, was supported by Plato in the Republic. The opposing assumption - that myths were not exactly true, yet they had a special kind of validity — was more widely held even in the emerging modern world