Image Worship Quotes

People should never worship images. The spread of mental darkness is due to the prevalence of idolatry.

Those reformers who preach against image-worship, or what they denounce as idolatry - to them I say "Brothers, if you are fit to worship God-without-form discarding all external help, do so, but why do you condemn others who cannot do the same?"

This external worship of images has, however, been described in all our Shastras as the lowest of all the low forms of worship. But that does not mean that it is a wrong thing to do.

If we refuse our homage to statues and frigid images, the very counterpart of their dead originals, with which hawks, and mice, and spiders are so well acquainted, does it not merit praise instead of penalty [Christians were punished for not worshiping Roman gods] that we have rejected what we have come to see is error? We cannot surely be made out to injure those whom we are certain are nonentities. What does not exist is in its nonexistence secure from suffering.

I may worship the image of the Lord; but that act is worthless if it is not accompanied with devotion. In the absence of devotion, the idol will just be a piece of stone, and so shall I; and the worship will only mean that a stone is facing a stone!

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.

We say that if a temple, or a symbol, or an image helps you to realize the Divine within, you are welcome to it. Have two hundred images if you like. If certain forms and formulas help you to realize the Divine, God speed you; have, by all means, whatever forms, temples, whatever ceremonies you want to bring you nearer to God. But do not quarrel about them; the moment you quarrel, you are not going Godward, you are going backward towards the brutes.

In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.

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

Despite the many iniquities that have found entrance into the practices of image-worship as it is in vogue now, I do not condemn it. Ay, where would I have been if I had not been blessed with the dust of the holy feet of that orthodox, image-worshipping Brahmin!

The secret of image - worship is that you are trying to develop your vision of Divinity in one thing.

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.

I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.

The worship of words is more pernicious than the worship of images. Grammatolatry is the worst species of idolatry.