Xenophanes
FameRank: 4

"Xenophanes of Colophon (city)/Colophon" (; ; c. 570 – c. 475 BC) was a Greece/Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and social and religious critic. Xenophanes lived a life of travel, having left Ionia at the age of 25 and continuing to travel throughout the Greek world for another 67 years. Some scholars say he lived in exile in Sicily. Knowledge of his views comes from fragments of his poetry, surviving as quotations by later Greek writers. To judge from these, his elegiac and Iamb (foot)/iambic poetry criticized and satire/satirized a wide range of ideas, including Homer and Hesiod, the belief in the pantheon (gods)/pantheon of anthropomorphic deity/gods and the Greeks' veneration of wikt:athleticism/athleticism. He is the earliest Greek poet who claims explicitly to be writing for future generations, creating "fame that will reach all of Greece, and never die while the Greek kind of songs survives."

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But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the work that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.

Men create the gods in their own image.

No human being will ever know the Truth, for even if they happen to say it by chance, they would not even known they had done so.