"But, strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers."
-William Robertson Smith
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"Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.“
-William Robertson Smith
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"We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit."
-William Robertson Smith
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"Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into a relation to his fellow-men and his religion... was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society."
-William Robertson Smith
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"The dissolution of the nation destroys the national religion, and dethrones the national deity."
-William Robertson Smith
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"Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part, or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged."
-William Robertson Smith
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"In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual."
-William Robertson Smith
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"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination."
-Albert Einstein
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"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities."
-Dr. Seuss
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"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
-Jorge Luis Borges
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"A lady's imagination is very rapid it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
-Jane Austen
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"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night."
-Edgar Allan Poe
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"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
-Sylvia Plath
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