Xenophanes Quotes on God
Xenophanes of Colophon (c.570–c.475 BC) — the early Pre-Socratic philosopher and rhapsode whose long career took him through the Greek-speaking colonies of the Mediterranean — gave classical Greek philosophy its founding critique of anthropomorphic religion. The surviving fragments develop the famous polemic against the Homeric and Hesiodic gods who steal, commit adultery, and deceive — if oxen and horses had hands, Xenophanes observes, they would draw their gods in the form of oxen and horses — and the parallel positive theology of the one greatest god who is unmoving, all-seeing, and acts on the world by the power of his thought alone. The framework, recovered through the doxographical tradition and Aristotle’s testimony, supplied the principal pre-Platonic statement of philosophical monotheism and shaped the subsequent Greek and broader Western tradition of philosophical theology.
Quotes
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“If oxen and horses or lions had hands and could draw with their hands, horses would draw the figures of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen.”
ἀλλ᾽ εἰ χεῖρας ἔχον βόες <ἵπποι τ᾽> ἠὲ λέοντες ἢ γράψαι χείρεσσι καὶ ἔργα τελεῖν ἅπερ ἄνδρες, ἵπποι μέν θ᾽ ἵπποισι βόες δέ τε βουσὶν ὁμοίας καί <κε> θεῶν ἰδέας ἔγραφον καὶ σώματ᾽ ἐποίουν τοιαῦθ᾽ οἷόν περ καὐτοὶ δέμας εἶχον <ἕκαστοι>. -
Attributed to Xenophanes:
“Mortals suppose that the gods are born, have clothes and voices and shapes like their own.”
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Attributed to Xenophanes:
“The Ethiopians say their gods are flat-nosed and dark; the Thracians, that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.”
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Attributed to Xenophanes:
“One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way like mortals in body or in mind.”
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Attributed to Xenophanes:
“No man knows or ever will know the truth about the gods and about everything I speak of; for even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet oneself knows it not; but seeming is wrought over all things.”
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“There is one god, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals neither in shape nor in thought.”
Fragment 23, as quoted in Notes on Greek Philosophy by Anthony Preus (Global Academic Publishing, 1996), p. 10