Ritual Quotes - Page 11

• Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.

  T. S. Eliot

  Inspirational, Life, Forever

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Selected Essays”, p.396, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I think the important thing to learn is that we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.

  Richard Dawkins

  Loyalty, Religious, Business

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• This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Spiritual, Believe, Emotional

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.178, A&C Black

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• The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Honor, Criticism

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• This is criterion by which the Church is to be judged, not by the forms of its doctrine or ritual, but by the reality of the reality of the love which it manifests.

  Bede Griffiths

  Spiritual, Reality, Church

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• I remember sitting at the end of my mum's bed being fascinated by her ritual of getting dressed. It was a very methodical and considered process. I suppose you could say she was my first real muse.

  Matthew Williamson

  Fashion, Real, Bed

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• Mathematics is a form of poetry which transcends poetry in that it proclaims a truth; a form of reasoning which transcends reasoning in that it wants to bring about the truth it proclaims; a form of action, of ritual behavior, which does not find fulfilment in the act but must proclaim and elaborate a poetic form of truth.

  Salomon Bochner

  Truth, Science, Doe

  Salomon Bochner “Collected Papers of Salomon Bochner”, American Mathematical Soc.

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• Hana: What on Earth is a 'barbeque'? Hel: A primitive tribal ritual featuring paper plates, elbows, flying insects, encrusted meat, hush puppies, and beer. Hana: I daren't ask what a 'hush puppy' is. Hel: Don't.

  Trevanian

  Beer, Flying, Meat

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• Nothing in life is ritual.

  William P. Young

  Life Is

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• Truth without enthusiasm, morality without emotion, ritual without soul, are things Christ unsparingly condemned. Destitute of fire, they are nothing more than a godless philosophy, an ethical system, and a superstition.

  Samuel Chadwick

  Christian, Philosophy, Fire

  Samuel Chadwick (2007). “The Way to Pentecost”, CLC Publications

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• ...just a little touches her and there. He puts his hands on your arms or back, he stands close to you, getting you used to him... it's a mating ritual. Like March of the Penguins.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Hands, Arms, Littles

  Lisa Kleypas (2015). “The Travis Family Series, Books 1-3: Blue-Eyed Devil, Smooth Taking Stranger and Sugar Daddy”, p.81, St. Martin's Press

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• Know that the eradication of the identification with the body is charity, spiritual austerity and ritual sacrifice; it is virtue, divine union and devotion; it is heaven, wealth, peace and truth; it is grace; it is the state of divine silence; it is the deathless death; it is jnana, renunciation, final liberation and bliss.

  Ramana Maharshi

  Spiritual, Sacrifice, Silence

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• Dance is one of the most powerful forms of magical ritual...It is an outer expression of the inner spirit.

  Ted Andrews

  Dance, Powerful, Expression

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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

  Strong, Ideas, Imagination

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• A prayer couched in the words of the soul, is far more powerful than any ritual.

  Paulo Coelho

  Prayer, Powerful, Soul

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• His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly. An image enters in, rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Powerful, Heart, Circles

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Walter W. Arndt (1989). “The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-true Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary, and Compact Biography ; Translated by Walter Arndt ; Foreword by Cyrus Hamlin”, p.161, UPNE

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• I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.

  John Green

  Religious, Ideas, Action

  John Green (2015). “Looking For Alaska Special 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.147, Penguin

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• Today's Gypsies, who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads' fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of roughhewn wood like a child's laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer's eye and soul.

  Bohumil Hrabal

  Children, Eye, Fire

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• I am so used to hints and mixed messages, saying things that might mean what they sort of sound like they mean. Games and contests, roles and rituals, talking in twelve languages at once so the true words won't be so obvious. I am not used to a plainspoken, honest truth.

  David Levithan

  Mean, Talking, Games

  David Levithan (2009). “Boy Meets Boy”, p.26, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• Lying in bed, half-covered by the blankets, I would drowsily ask why he had come to my door that night long ago. It had become a ritual for us, as it does for all lovers: where, when, why? remember...I understand even old people rehearse their private religion of how they first loved, most guarded of secrets. And he would answer, sleep blurring his words, "Because I had to." The question and the answer were always the same. Why? Because I had to.

  Margaret George

  Lying, Sleep, Night

  Margaret George (2010). “The Memoirs of Cleopatra: A Novel”, p.751, Macmillan

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• In the center stood a marble alter, where a kid in a toga was doing some sort of ritual in front of a massive golden statue of the big dude himself:Jupiter the sky god, dressed in a silk XXXL purple toga, holding a lightning bolt. "It doesn't look like that," Percy muttered. "What?" Hazel asked. "The master bolt," Percy said. "What are you talking about?" "I-" Percy frowned. For a second, he'd thought he remembered something. Now it was gone. "Nothing, I guess.

  Rick Riordan

  Kids, Talking, Sky

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• Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

  Jonathan Maberry

  Wall, Heart, Civilization

  Jonathan Maberry (2012). “Dust & Decay”, p.437, Simon and Schuster

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• That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother's palm and fingertips, he was also removing all traces of any tiny leftover parts, and suddenly a ritual which I'd always found incestuous and gross seemed to me more like a desperate act on Joseph's part to get out, to leave, to extract every little last remnant and bring it into open air.

  Aimee Bender

  Mother, Air, Details

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• She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.

  Ruth Reichl

  People, Kitchen, Hungry

  Ruth Reichl (2011). “Tender At The Bone”, p.34, Random House

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• The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Sex, Naps, Filling Up

  The CBC Interview, www.cbc.ca. September 8, 2010.

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