top of page
.png){kind=small}
Exlpore more Ritual quotes
"Ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don't stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change."
"That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community."
"When the Master entered the great temple he asked about everything. Someone said, 'Who will say that this son of the man of Zou knows about ritual? When he enters the temple, he asks about everything'. The Master heard of it and said, 'This is the ritual'."
"The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken."
"Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget."
Explore more quotes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all."
"If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous and the perpetual exercise of God's power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be."
"Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat."
"Lull me to sleep, ye winds, whose fitful soundSeems from some faint Aeolian harp-string caught;Seal up the hundred wakeful eyes of thoughtAs Hermes with his lyre in sleep profoundThe hundred wakeful eyes of Argus bound;For I am weary, and am overwroughtWith too much toil, with too much care distraught,And with the iron crown of anguish crowned.Lay thy soft hand upon my brow and cheek,O peaceful Sleep! until from pain releasedI breathe again uninterrupted breath!Ah, with what subtile meaning did the GreekCall thee the lesser mystery at the feastWhereof the greater mystery is death!"
"Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author."
bottom of page