“When a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the tree spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought.”
Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 9, The Worship of Trees.
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James Frazer 50
Scottish social anthropologist 1854–1941Related quotes

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Ch III : The Tool
Variant translation of: <span id="perfection"></span>Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher.
Ch. III: L'Avion <!-- p. 60 -->
It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
Context: Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?
It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

A Tree Telling of Orpheus (1968)
Context: Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.

Philip Nicholas Shuttleworth (1782–1842) http://openlibrary.org/a/OL4475476A/Philip-Nicholas-Shuttleworth, bishop of Chichester, in an address "Christ's Yoke Easy and Burden Light", published in The Sunday Library; or, The Protestant's Manual for the Sabbath-day (1831) http://books.google.com/books?id=sd0EAAAAQAAJ by Thomas Frognall Dibdin; this seems to have become misattributed to Channing in A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908) by Tryon Edwards
Misattributed

Source: Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523), p. 89