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An idol is representation or symbol of an object of worship

• Idol: A representation or symbol of an object of worship. Merriam Webster
• Idol: An image or other material object representing a deity to which religious worship is addressed. Dictionary.com
• Idol: An image of a deity other than God. Dictionary.com
• Idol: An object or picture that is worshipped as a god. Cambridge Dictionary
• Idolatry is the worship of an idol or cult image, being a physical image, such as a statue, or a person in place of God. Moshe Halbertal

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Some faiths such as Hinduism permit the use of idols in worship…

• The Sufi saint Mazhar Jaan Jana of 18th century Delhi believed that the Quran condemns bowing before deities because in pre-Islamic idol worship stones were considered god. But Hindus pray to god through that idol, which is a reflection of god. In Vedas god is nirguna and nirankara, that is, he has no attributes and no shape, that is the real belief of Hindus. As Muslims visit graves, so Hindus worship idols. Asghar Ali Engineer
• Idolatry is permissible in Hinduism when it sub serves an ideal. Mahatma Gandhi
• The idol is the expression of religion. Swami Vivekananda

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…finding them to be a helpful way to connect to God…

• Some may be helped by images, some may not. Some require an image outside, others one inside the brain. Swami Vivekananda
• The secret of image – worship is that you are trying to develop your vision of Divinity in one thing. Swami Vivekananda

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…a useful focus during prayer, meditation or worship…

• To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention – on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God – that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer. W. H. Auden
• God is worshipped only in pictures, images, idols. Sathya Sai Baba

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…though it is not considered the highest form of worship

• This external worship of images has, however, been described in all our Shastras as the lowest of all the low forms of worship. But that does not mean that it is a wrong thing to do. Swami Vivekananda

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God can be said to reside in the idol

• The idol in the temple is not God. But since God resides in every atom, He resides in that idol too. Mahatma Gandhi

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Other religions condemn idols…

• Those who cling to worthless idols, turn away from God’s love for them. But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.’ Jonah
• Man’s mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain. John Calvin
• Who is this before whose presence idols tumble to the sod? While he cries out — Allah Akbar! and there is no god but God! William Ross Wallace
• It is not he who forms idols in gold or marble that makes them gods, but he who kneels before them. Martial
• Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings who oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ D. A. Carson
• Idolatry is worshipping anything that ought to be used, or using anything that is meant to be worshipped. Saint Augustine
• God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it–a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place. John Ruskin
• The opposite of theism is not atheism, it’s idolatry Peter Kreeft
• The heart of all idolatry in the Bible is the de-godding of God. D. A. Carson
• Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a begging. Martin Luther

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…believing all idols to be a false God

• A loving God who has no wrath is no God. He is an idol of our own making as much as if we carved Him out of stone. C. Sproul
• What men deny is not God, but some preposterous idol of the imagination. George Tyrrell
• Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just. Such a God is an idol of your own. J. C. Ryle
• When people say, I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself, they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God’s. Timothy Keller
• To have a faith, therefore, or a trust in anything, where God hath not promised, is plain idolatry, and a worshipping of thine own imagination instead of God. William Tyndale

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An idol is seen to be a replacement for God

• When we encounter the world of ideas for the first time, we easily get overwhelmed. Scripture is telling us, ‘Don’t be distracted by the details. Cut to the core by asking, What is its idol?’ Whatever functions as its God substitute will shape everything else. Nancy Pearcey
• Idols tend to be good things that you have turned into god things, which therefore become bad things Mark Driscoll
• For what is idolatry if not this: to worship the gifts in place of the Giver himself? John Calvin
• Tis mad idolatry To make the service greater than the god. William Shakespeare
• To have a faith, therefore, or a trust in anything, where God hath not promised, is plain idolatry, and a worshipping of thine own imagination instead of God. William Tyndale
• Idolatry is seeking security and meaning in someone or something other than God. A. R. Bernard

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God is not believed to be present in any idol

• God is not present in idols. Your feelings are your god. The soul is your temple. Chanakya

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Idols are even believed to be offensive to God

• An idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand. Aiden Wilson Tozer

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• If you love anything better than God you are idolaters: if there is anything you would not give up for God it is your idol: if there is anything that you seek with greater fervor than you seek the glory of God, that is your idol, and conversion means a turning from every idol. Charles Spurgeon
• What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. Timothy Keller
• Whatever you love more than God is your idol. Dwight L. Moody
• Anything you love more, fear more, serve more, or value more than God is your idol. Adrian Rogers
• What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.  Timothy Keller
• If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning of life, and identity then it is an idol. Timothy Keller
• As long as you want anything very much, especially more than you want God, it is an idol. A. B. Simpson
• We do not fear the loss of God’s favor, for either we have it not. We cannot lose it. What we fear is the loss of our idols. R. C. Sproul, Jr.
• What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. Timothy Keller
• We make a god out of whatever we find most joy in. So find your joy in God and be done with all idolatry. John Piper
• When something becomes so important to you that it drives your behavior and commands your emotions, you are worshipping it. J. D. Greear
• Whatever a man seeks, honors, or exalts more than God is the god of his idolatry. William Bernard Ullathorne
• Idolatry happens when we take good things and make them ultimate things Timothy Keller

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Worshiping an idol instead of God is a form of spiritual impoverishment

• How many kinds of moral and material poverty we face today as a result of denying God and putting so many idols in his place! Pope Francis
• Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice. Aldous Huxley
• Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth. Pope Francis
• The universe shudders in horror that we have this infinitely valuable, infinitely deep, infinitely rich, infinitely wise, infinitely loving God, and instead of pursuing him with steadfast passion and enthralled fury — instead of loving him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; instead of attributing to him glory and honor and praise and power and wisdom and strength — we just try to take his toys and run. It is still idolatry to want God for his benefits but not for himself. Matt Chandler
• The person who does not seek the kingdom first does not seek it at all, regardless of how worthy the idolatry that he or she has substituted for it. Richard J. Foster

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God is more infinitely more powerful than any idol

• An idol is what man makes and then has to carry. God makes a man and then carries him. Benjamin Whichcote
• Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God’s dust is greater than your idol. Rabindranath Tagore
• An idol tells people exactly what to believe, God presents them with choices they have to make for themselves. The difference is far from insignificant; before the idol men remain dependent children, before God they are burdened and at the same time liberated to participate in the decisions of endless creation. Arthur Miller

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Some argue it is impossible to worship both God and an idol

• One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another. Simone Weil

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Instead of using idols, we should aim to experience God directly

• The soul seeks God with its whole being. Because it is desperate to be whole, the soul is God-smitten and God-crazy and God-obsessed. My mind may be obsessed with idols; my will may be enslaved to habits; my body may be consumed with appetites. But my soul will never find rest until it rests in God. John Ortberg
• We make a god out of whatever we find most joy in. So find your joy in God and be done with all idolatry. John Piper
• Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part to idols, to the many false gods that now bite away at our lives. Peter Kreeft

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Instead of using idols, we should also turn to ourselves…

• Turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what hides in yourselves; bring it to the light; show yourselves! Hakim Bey
• One individual is his or her own best teacher, and no other idol or false image should be worshiped or adored because the God we are all seeking lies inside oneself, not outside. Shirley MacLaine

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…and our innate inner joy for this is the presence of God within us

• Idolatry is when you become the source of your own joy. Poverty of spirit is a wonderful thing. Paul Washer
• The enemy of joy is not suffering, it is idolatry. Matt Papa

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As humans we fall easily for false idols

• If not to God, you will surrender to the opinions or expectations of others, to money, to resentment, to fear, or to your own pride, lusts, or ego. You were designed to worship God and if you fail to worship Him, you will create other things (idols) to give your life to. You are free to choose, what you surrender to but you are not free from the consequence of that choice. Rick Warren
• Man’s mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain. John Calvin
• The Human heart is an idol factory. John Calvin

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Identify your idols…

• It is time to cease to argue about God , and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry. Erich Fromm

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…by asking what you cannot do without

• Anything that I want, I must also be ok with not having, otherwise it’s idolatry. Mike Donehey
• To identify your own idols, ask questions like these: What things take the place of God in my life? Where do I find my significance and my confidence? What things make me really angry? Anger usually erupts when an idol gets knocked off the shelf. Philip Graham Ryken

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Surrender your idols and let them go

• When all of our idols are taken away, all our securities and defense mechanisms,
• we find out who we really are. We’re so little, so poor, so empty and a shock to ourselves. But the Biblical God takes away our shame, and we are eventually able to present ourselves in an honest and humble form. Then we find out who we really are and who God is for us and it is more than enough. That is how an enslaved people became God’s people, Israel. Aaron Lines
• Far more unwaveringly, the neurotic keeps before his eye his God, his idol, his ideal of personality and clings to his guiding principle, losing sight in the meanwhile of reality, whereas the normal person is always ready to dispense with this crutch, this aid, and reckon unhampered with reality. Alfred Adler

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To prevent idolatry, relate all blessings directly to God and rest in a state of constant gratitude

• If gratitude is not rooted in the beauty of God before the gift, it is probably disguised idolatry. May God grant us a heart to delight in him for who he is so that all our gratitude for his gifts will be the echo of our joy in the excellency of the Giver! John Piper

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God as a projection of our needs, fears and desires can become an idol

• Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. Karen Armstrong
• Many people make their own God; and he is much what the French may mean when they talk of le bon Dieu,–very indulgent, rather weak, near at hand when we want anything, but far away out of sight when we have a mind to do wrong. Such a God is as much an idol as if he were an image of stone. Julius Charles Hare
• Ultimately all idolatry is worship of the self projected and objectified: all idolization is self-idolization. Will Herberg

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Peak spiritual states and emotions can become an idol

• If we must “feel” God’s presence before we believe he is with us, we again reduce God to our ability to grasp him, making him an idol instead of acknowledging him as God. Craig S. Keener

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Any mental image we have of God is ultimately an idol, a substitute for the real thing

• When we try to imagine what God is like we must of necessity use that-which-is-not- God as the raw material for our minds to work on; hence whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have constructed our image out of that which He has made and what He has made is not God. If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• Man Made ‘God’ in his own image. The eternal, the infinate, the unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as ‘my god’ or ‘our god’. Eckhart Tolle
• We may worship a picture as God, but not God as the picture. God in the picture is right, but the picture as God is wrong. God in the image is perfectly right. There is no danger there. This is the real worship of God. But the image-God is a mere Pratika. Swami Vivekananda
• If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle. Thomas B. Macaulay

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Any conceptual understanding of God is ultimately an idol

• Concepts create idols of God, of whom only wonder can tell us anything. Gregory of Nyssa
• We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship. Blaise Pascal
• The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind. Peter Rollins
• Idolatry is not simply worshiping a stone image; idolatry is any concept of God that reduces Him to less than who He really is. Ron Carlson

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God as anything tangible or concrete is an idol

• A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Truth can become an idol

• A worship of truth can be idolatry if the truth is small enough. Austin O’Malley
• Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. Alan Watts

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Self-righteousness can become an idol

• Self-righteousness….is the largest idol of the human heart – the idol which man loves most and God hates most. Dearly beloved, you will always be going back to this idol. You are always trying to be something in yourself, to gain God’s favour by thinking little of your sin, or by looking to your repentance, tears, prayers ; or by looking to your religious exercises, your frames, etc; or by looking to your graces, the Spirit’s work in your heart. Beware of false Christs. Study sanctification to the utmost, but make not a Christ of it. Robert Murray M’Cheyne
• Not only the adoration of images is idolatry, but also trust in one’s own righteousness, works and merits, and putting confidence in riches and power. As the latter is the commonest, so it also is the most noxious. Martin Luther

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Religious fundamentalism can become an idol

• Like the people of Israel who created a golden calf to represent God while Moses was away, fundamentalist Christians have built their own idols to represent God until Jesus returns. The religion of fundamentalism is idolatry. Mel White

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Our religious doctrines can become an idol if we place them ahead of God

• An idol is something that we look to for things that only God can give. Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrine for their standing with God rather than on God himself and his grace. It is a subtly but deadly mistake. The sign that you have slipped into this form of self-justification is that you become what the book of Proverbs calls a ‘scoffer’. Timothy Keller
• Many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the Bible, making it an idol. Alan Watts
• The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we’re not even supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don’t think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you’ve captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures. John Shelby Spong
• We should have understood long ago that there is, in this world, religion without God, religion as a center of all idols that possess fallen man, religion that is the justification for these idols. Alexander Schmemann
• Culture’s essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object. Northrop Frye
• To get overprotective about particular readings of the Bible is always in danger of idolatry. N. T. Wright
• True religion is not about possessing the truth. No religion does that. It is rather an invitation into a journey that leads one toward the mystery of God. Idolatry is religion pretending that it has all the answers. John Shelby Spong

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False devils can become an idol

• Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice. Gilbert K. Chesterton

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The universe of form and our belief in its ultimate reality (philosophical materialism) can become an idol

• We are all born idolaters, and idolatry is good, because it is in the nature of man. Who can get beyond it? Only the perfect man, the God-man. The rest are all idolaters. So long as we see this universe before us, with its forms and shapes, we are all idolaters. This is a gigantic symbol we are worshipping. He who says he is the body is a born idolater. Swami Vivekananda
• Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Pope John Paul II

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The desires and thoughts that we worship in place of God can become an idol

• Idols aren’t stone statues. They are thoughts, desires, and longings that we worship in the place of the true God Elyse Fitzpatrick
• Idolatry is in a man’s own thought, not in the opinion of another. John Selden
• When your thoughts and opinions become intellectual gods in rebellion against the Word of God, you are in idolatry. John Hagee
• The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. Aiden Wilson Tozer

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Our vices can become an idol

• Go on your knees before God. Bring all your idols; bring self-will, and pride, and every evil lust before Him, and give them up. Devote yourself, heart and soul, to His will; and see if you do not know of the doctrine. Henry Ward Beecher
• Anything that effects our decisions besides that of the Glory of God and His Will Alone is an idol. Why are people so free to do as they please and make decisions off of pleasures, feelings or emotion? It is because they have not been taken captive by the Lord Jesus Christ and He alone does not rule in that life, there are rivals on the throne. David Wilkerson
• All too often, as we know from experience, people do not choose life; they do not accept the gospel of life, but let themselves be led by ideologies and ways of thinking that block life, that do not respect life, because they are dictated by selfishness, self-interest, profit, power and pleasure and not by love. … As a result, the Living God is replaced by fleeting human idols, which offer the intoxication of a flash of freedom, but in the end bring new forms of slavery and death. Pope Francis

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Ignorance can become an idol

• I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry. Robert Charles Wilson

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Human reason can become an idol

• Can reason be an idol? Certainly. The philosophy of rationalism puts human reason in the place of God as the source and standard of all truth. Nancy Pearcey

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Popular opinion can become an idol

• Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry. Swami Vivekananda

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Nationalism and tribalism can become an idol

• I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism–the idolatry of the 20th century. Cornel West
• The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the ‘chosen people’. Simone Weil
• Like all idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the real, a love of process for a love of country. Pat Buchanan
• Patriotism is idolatry of the self. Simone Weil

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Material possessions can become an idol…

• Modern idols or false gods can take such forms as clothes, homes, businesses, machines, automobiles, pleasure boats, and numerous other material deflectors. Spencer W. Kimball
• The heart clings to collected treasure. Stored-up possessions get between me and God. Where my treasure is, there is my trust, my security, my comfort, my God. Treasure means idolatry. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected…. Hoarding is idolatry. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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…and any form of wealth

• Those who worship gold in a world so corrupt as this we live in have at least one thing to plead in defense of their idolatry–the power of their idol. It is true that, like other idols, it can neither move, see, hear, feel, nor understand; but, unlike other idols, it has often communicated all these powers to those who had them not, and annihilated them in those who had. This idol can boast of two peculiarities; it is worshipped in all climates, without a single temple, and by all classes, without a single hypocrite. Charles Caleb Colton

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Power and fame can become an idol

• When we do not adore God, we adore something else. Money and power are false idols which often take the place of God. Pope Francis
• Fame, power, and gold, are loved for their own sakes – are worshipped with a blind, habitual idolatry. Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Civilization, society and comfort can become an idol

• Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air? Mary Baker Eddy
• Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more. William Wordsworth
• We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption. Pope Francis

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People can become idols

• People were never meant to be idols. We aren’t supposed to be worshipped. Only God deserves that kind of praise. Karen Kingsbury
• As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• Too much faith in personality has a tendency to produce weakness and idolatry, but intense love for the Guru makes rapid growth possible. Swami Vivekananda
• He was my equal in beauty, a paragon of grace and charm, sparkling with wit, and burning with love. I adored him to distraction, to the point of idolatry: I loved him as one can never love twice. Voltaire

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Some advocate idols that satisfy our deepest needs

• We think that idols are bad things, but that is almost never the case. The greater the good, the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs and hopes. Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life. Timothy Keller

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• Heathen, n: A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. Ambrose Bierce