“The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The universe is a machine for the making of Gods." by Henri Bergson?
Henri Bergson photo
Henri Bergson 18
French philosopher 1859–1941

Related quotes

Cormac McCarthy photo

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter II
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Context: A man’ s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

Manly P. Hall photo

“We are the gods of the atoms that make up ourselves but we are also the atoms of the gods that make up the universe.”

Manly P. Hall (1901–1990) Canadian writer and mystic

Think on These Things (1998), compiled by Clarke E. Johnston, p. 22
Other quotes

Herbert Read photo

“Art differs from nature not in its organic form, but in its human origins: in the fact that it is not God or a machine that makes a work of art, but an individual”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

The Origins of Art (1966)
Other Quotes
Context: What I am searching for... is some formula that would combine individual initiative with universal values, and that combination would give us a truly organic form. Form, which we discover in nature by analysis, is obstinately mathematical in its manifestations—which is to say that creation in art requires thought and deliberation. But this is not to say that form can be reduced to a formula. In every work of art it must be re-created, but that too is true of every work of nature. Art differs from nature not in its organic form, but in its human origins: in the fact that it is not God or a machine that makes a work of art, but an individual with his instincts and intuitions, with his sensibility and his mind, searching relentlessly for the perfection that is neither in mind nor in nature, but in the unknown. I do not mean this in an other-worldly sense, only that the form of the flower is unknown to the seed.

Alan Turing photo

“A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.”

"Intelligent Machinery: A Report by A. M. Turing," (Summer 1948), submitted to the National Physical Laboratory (1948) and published in Key Papers: Cybernetics, ed. C. R. Evans and A. D. J. Robertson (1968) and, in variant form, in Machine Intelligence 5, ed. B. Meltzer and D. Michie (1969).

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The Efficacy of Prayer (1958)
Context: Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate. It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that. And I dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian: “I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic.” Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” When God becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.

Miguel de Unamuno photo

“It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God, to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
Context: It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God, to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him, yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist. For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He first creates us. It is He who is continually creating Himself.

Michael Swanwick photo
Menander photo

“You are by your epiphany a veritable "god from the machine."”

Menander (-342–-291 BC) Athenian playwright of New Comedy

The Woman Possessed with a Divinity, fragment 227, as translated in ‪Menander: The Principal Fragments‬‎ (1921) by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; this is one of the earliest occurrences of the phrase which became famous in its Latin form as "Deus ex machina."

“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

Sol LeWitt (1965); quoted in: Joseph Kosuth, (1969), " Art after Philosophy http://www.ubu.com/papers/kosuth_philosophy.html"
Quotes of Sol Lewitt

Related topics