Ritual Quotes
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.
The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.
Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and - if it does not create it - maintains decency.
Zen was a reaction. Just as Buddha came into the world and spoke against the fall of Vedanta, so Buddhism lost its essence and became ritual. Zen was a reaction to that.
When you live a life devoid of ritual and convention, with honesty and self-effacement, then you are on the road to freedom.
You have to know your triggers for stress and then have rituals for combating them.
I think any belief system that says to a person, "I don't need Jesus because I have my ritual" is a problem.
Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life.
Virtually all the trends that matter are making a mockery of the industry's ritual incantations about the values and virtues of a free press in a free society.
An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.
Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.
We don't have too much ritual in our life anymore. And these life symbols which people rely on to keep their feeling of well being, that life is not too bad after all are required more and more.
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.
I think as much as we're cyber connecting it's really nice to just sit and talk, and have that ritual.
The putting on of vestments and lighting candles, it's a wonderful ritual that never changes from one Mass to another.
...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.
Those of us who preach religion: Preach the meaning of "ritual," and stop burying the people and enslaving the people by religious rituals, and then showing them a hypocritical example in leadership!
Prayer is a ritual! But at the root of prayer is the idea of complete bowing down in submission to the Will of God.
I never eat standing up, I never eat in front of the refrigerator. I treat myself very formally with meals. I don't watch TV or read. It's a little bit of a ritual, and it's more enjoyable.
I think the prom is very serious also. It's an American ritual, it's a rite of passage, and it's very much a part of this country.
Cooking meat over a fire is one of the most stirring of those ritual acts, usually performed outdoors, on special occasions, in public, and by men.
My spirit life very much depends on my work. My work very much depends on my spirit life. And I pray every day, as part of my own ritual, to a god I believe in, not a god somebody else believes in.
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
People are losing jobs, people need to be entertained, and I want to make movies that parents and children can look forward to seeing, that can become a kind of family ritual.
Wine, like food, is so emotional. If you think about it, so much of the courting ritual is surrounded by wine and food. There's a built-in romance to wine.
Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.
In Los Angeles, I'm always in Fred Segal. It's become a ritual. I have lunch and then buy lots of things I don't need. Usually tons of clothes for the kids that they grow out of in 10 seconds.
A cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens.
Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness.
The true shaman, the true naturalist, works to reconnect conscious human life with Nature and Spirit through totems and ritual.
My brand of fantasy is completely devoid of the traditional notions of magic as ritual. Instead I see the fantastic as a meta-layer of existence beyond the real world.
She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties.
Okay, well, on Borelletrox V, the males are kept completely isolated from all images of the female until Binding Day and the females are, erm, let's just say they’ve' got a lot of--
They like to use those fancy words. They don't like to say “raped, '” he said. “They say “misdeed, ' “inappropriate touching, ' “mistake.' That's insulting. I'm not a mistake.
Ritual and ceremony are powerful bonding tools. They result in a sense of community, a feeling of unity far beyond what you might expect.
Thanks to Karen Connelly who read earlier versions of this manuscript and to Ronald Hatch my editor and publisher.