J. Robert Oppenheimer, witnessing the first test of a nuclear weapon, confessed to tasting sin. But he and all his colleagues knew from the beginning what lay waiting at the end of the project. And which was the stronger flavor, the sin, or the satisfaction of having stolen fire from the gods?
—Theodore Roszak
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
—Oscar Wilde
If you lack the iron and the fuzz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense.
—Tom Robbins
To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We make people into Gods, desperate that they never leave us and hopeful that someday, if we ever deserve it, maybe they'll love us back even half way.
—Jennifer Elisabeth in Born Ready
All the gods are dead except the god of war.
—Eldridge Cleaver
When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
—John Steinbeck
Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.
—Plato
Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising.
—Cyril Connolly
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
—Iris Murdoch