Neil MacGregor Quotes

But it is with a different kind of spell that art deludes you ... it leads you to pay religious honor and worship to images and pictures.

The Bible never tells us what Jesus looked like, and in the earliest surviving paintings of him, he is sometimes depicted as short-haired, sometimes as beardless, with no authoritative version winning out over the others. Yet around 400 A.D., all of the other competing images were replaced by the long-haired, bearded Jesus we know today.

An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?

Pictures may serve as helps to religion but are only an appendix to idolatry, for the people must be taught to believe in false gods and in the power of saints before they will learn to worship their images.

It has been said by church historians that in those periods of Christian history where renewal, revival, and awakening took place and the church was at its strongest, that coincidental with those periods in church history, there was a strong focus on the psalms in the life of God's people-particularly in the worship of God's people.

Never think that you need to protect God. Because anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.

The Last Supper is supposed to be thirteen men. Who is this woman? "Everyone misses it, our preconceived notions of this scene are so powerful that our mind blocks out the incongruity and overrides our eyes.

We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.

Whatever thing a man sets his heart on...is his god; and if his god doesn't also happen to be the true and living God of Israel that man is laboring in idolatry.

It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.

No graven images may be Worshipped, except the currency.

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them.

There is no idol more debasing than the worship of money.

Too much faith in personality has a tendency to produce weakness and idolatry, but intense love for the Guru makes rapid growth possible.

To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my earliest passion).

We are, on the whole, an idolatrous people...

Consider, it is impossible that your idol sins and you can go to heaven together; and that those who will not part with these do not indeed love Christ at the bottom, but only in word and show, which will not do the business.

Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship, worship rather than worship God.

It is strange what society will endure from its idols.

Tis mad idolatry To make the service greater than the god.

Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.

Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.

Today, idols are not made of wood, stone, or brass. They are made of money, sex, and power.

Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.

The heart of all idolatry in the Bible is the de-godding of God.