Ritual Quotes - Page 26

• Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Change, Enemy, Legends

  Elizabeth Janeway (1981). “Powers of the weak”, William Morrow & Co

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've begun to recognize myself as a Catholic writer because my whole notion of the image, of symbol, of art and what it can do, has been conditioned by my immersion in Catholic culture, ritual, and art since my earliest days. Catholicism seeped into me through every pore. Catholicism is about seeping and pores!

  Joyelle McSweeney

  Art, Catholic, Culture

  "'Art as a sacred event'". The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. April 7, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm not religious, but I've always been attracted to the rituals of religion; as a kid, Sunday church was the closest thing I had to an interactive, theatrical experience.

  Missy Mazzoli

  Religious, Kids, Sunday

  "To provide a surprising path through a jungle of notes". Interview with Matthew Zapruder, logger.believermag.com. June 22, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine - that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they're talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.

  Richard Rohr

  Talking, Goal, Empathy

  Source: ryanthomasneace.com

  47 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think the metaphysical world is something Lisa and I have always been interested in. We were encouraged from a very young age to believe in magic. Our mom used to take us to fairy parties. As we got older, I was always very drawn to manifesting my own destiny...learning how to do spells and personal ritual.

  Jessica Origliasso

  Mom, Party, Believe

  Source: www.fuse.tv

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Well I wasn't really attacking the religious beliefs [in the song 'The Vatican Rag'], I was attacking the formality of the rituals of the Catholic church; however, people took it wrongly.

  Tom Lehrer

  Religious, People, Catholic

  "The Music Show" with Andrew Ford, www.abc.net.au. July 8, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think we all live in a world that is so fast-paced, it's threatening and absolutely saturated with change and novelty and insecurity. Therefore, the ritual of cooking and feeding my family and friends, whoever drops in, is what makes me feel that I'm in a universe that is contained.

  Nigella Lawson

  Food, Thinking, Cooking

  55 Copy quote

• In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual.

  Shahzia Sikander

  Gestures, Painting, Ends

  8 Copy quote

• Ritual is one of the ways in which humans put their lives in perspective, whether it be Purim, Advent, or drawing down the moon. Ritual calls together the shades and specters in people's lives, sorts them out, puts them to rest.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Moon, Drawing, People

  7 Copy quote

• The Mackenzie had never met folk so poor in story and song and legends, and it moved him to a pity that pricked at his eyes. Without that tapestry of colour and words and ritual, what was life but eating and mating, sleeping and moving your bowels? All of them good and necessary, but not enough; and they themselves needed that framework too, to give them meaning.

  S.M. Stirling

  Song, Moving, Eye

  "The Sword of the Lady". Book by S. M. Stirling, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In certain tantric rituals the candidate is first beaten by his guru, hashish forced down him, and he is taken at midnight to a dark cemetery for sacred sexual intercourse. Thus he achieves union with his god.

  Peter J. Carroll

  Taken, Dark, Midnight

  Peter J. Carroll (1987). “Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic”, p.35, Weiser Books

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• All children need a laptop. Not a computer, but a human laptop. Moms, Dads, Grannies and Grandpas, Aunts, Uncles - someone to hold them, read to them, teach them. Loved ones who will embrace them and pass on the experience, rituals and knowledge of a hundred previous generations. Loved ones who will pass to the next generation their expectations of them, their hopes, and their dreams.

  Colin Powell

  Love, Mom, Dream

  136 Copy quote

• Television's contribution to family life has been an equivocal one. For while it has, indeed, kept the members of the family from dispersing, it has not served to bring them together. By its domination of the time families spend together, it destroys the special quality that distinguishes one family from another, a quality that depends to a great extent on what a family does, what special rituals, games, recurrent jokes, familiar songs, and shared activities it accumulates.

  Marie Winn

  Song, Games, Special

  14 Copy quote

• In its effect on family relationships, in its facilitation of parental withdrawal from an active role in the socialization of their children, and in its replacement of family rituals and special events, television has played an important role in the disintegration of the American family.

  Marie Winn

  Children, Special, Important

  10 Copy quote

• I'm not superstitious in my normal daily life but I get that way about writing, even though I know it's all bullshit. But I began that way and so, that's the way it is. My ritual is I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It's a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook and then fill it up.

  Quentin Tarantino

  Notebook, Writing, Hands

  Source: allwomenstalk.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The camel carries on his dreary circular task with his usual slow and pompous step and head poised superciliously, as if it were a ritual affair above the comprehension of the vulgar; and no doubt he comforts himself for the dullness of life by a sense of virtue, like many other formalists beside him.

  Freya Stark

  Doubt, Usual, Comfort

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Divorce is one of the loneliest of modern rituals. Before, during, and after the actual culmination of the legal process it is an ordeal that rips people away from their roots, their important relationships, and a part of themselves. There is really nothing like it - except perhaps war.

  Suzanne Gordon

  Rip, War, Divorce

  Suzanne Gordon (1976). “Lonely in America”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• We humans have always needed rituals to draw like curtains over the chasms of the unknown. Without them we go mad, I think.

  Patricia J. Williams

  Thinking, Mad, Curtains

  4 Copy quote

• Magic is an exercise of a pattern of thought (sometimes represented by a gesture, ritual, or the calling of a true name) that results in manifestation/s. But these patterns of thought can have so much to do with whimsy that magic often is jokes.

  Helen Oyeyemi

  Exercise, Names, Often Is

  8 Copy quote

• The claim that myth is always a narrative spin-off of ritual; the claim that myth is the projection of human anxieties onto a cosmological scrim; the claim that myths are invented to give sanction to human predilections and institutions... These are ways of trivializing a mode of thought that has served humanity well for a very long time.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Long, Giving, Anxiety

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• We become male automatically because of the Y chromosome and the little magic peanut, but if we are to become men we need the helpof other men--we need our fathers to model for us and then to anoint us, we need our buddies to share the coming-of-age rituals with us and to let us join the team of men, and we need myths of heroes to inspire us and to show us the way.

  Frank Pittman

  Father, Team, Hero

  5 Copy quote

• Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.

  Northrop Frye

  Fall, Together, Special

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.412, University of Toronto Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ancient worship . . . does truth. All one has to do is to study the ancient liturgies to see that liturgies clearly do truth by their order and in their substance. This is why so many young people today are now adding ancient elements to their worship. . . . This recovery of ancient practices is not the mere restoration of ritual but a deep, profound, and passionate engagement with truth—truth that forms and shapes the spiritual life into a Christlikeness that issues forth in the call to a godly and holy life and into a deep commitment to justice and to the needs of the poor.

  Robert E. Webber

  Spiritual, Recovery, Commitment

  9 Copy quote

• The Miss America contest isthe most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.

  Gerald Early

  Ambition, Class, America

  4 Copy quote

• All those tough guys who want to scare the world into seeing them as men . . . who don't know how to be a man with a woman, only abrute or a boy, who fill up the divorce courts; all those corporate raiders and rain-forest burners and war starters who want more in hopes that will make them feel better; . . . are suffering from Father Hunger. They go through their puberty rituals day after day for a lifetime, waiting for a father to anoint them and say "Attaboy," to treat them as good enough to be considered a man.

  Frank Pittman

  Father, War, Rain

  13 Copy quote