Top 100 Cathedral Quotes
#1. Seeing that picture, for me, was like Chartres Cathedral.
Henry Moore
#2. People said making clothes inside out was not proper. I disagreed, because clothes that are inside out are as beautiful as a cathedral.
Sonia Rykiel
#4. For he of all men knew how dangerously stubborn Henry Fitz Empress could be.
There were faint bloodstains upon the tiles in Canterbury Cathedral testifying to that.
Sharon Kay Penman
#5. Crouching in position posing in perfect posture
On the rooftop of a gothic cathedral sits a monster
Justin Bienvenue
#6. Art is a spiritual practice. If it weren't for art, I'd have given up on God a long time ago. This cathedral though....is very convincing.
Janice Macleod
#7. A good meal must be as harmonious as a symphony and as well-constructed as a Norman cathedral.
Fernand Point
#8. We will live to see the day that St. Patrick's Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.
Gloria Steinem
#9. The Sabbath is a weekly cathedral raised up in my dining room, in my family, in my heart.
Anita Diament
#10. I have come to regard the law courts not as a cathedral but rather as a casino.
Richard Ingrams
#11. I am tired and drunk and still hungry. He is full of steak and Coca-Cola and, presumably, energy: enough energy to cross the road and walk up the steps inside the tower of the cathedral, which I have never entered.
Joanna Walsh
#12. One moment it's a cathedral, at another time there is no words to describe it when it ceases, for short periods of time, to have any regard for the proprieties that constitute not only Parliament, but its tradition. I've seen it in all its greatness. I have inwardly wept over it when it is degraded.
John Diefenbaker
#13. The tropical night has the companionability of a Roman Catholic Cathedral compared to the Protestant Churches of the North, which let you in on business only. Here in the great room everybody comes and goes, this is the place where things are going on.
Isak Dinesen
#14. To my way of thinking, no one can live in the grandest cathedral on earth, the Rocky Mountains, and not know that there's someone bigger than man in charge of the world.
Mary Connealy
#15. The mighty edifice of Government science dominated the scene in the middle of the 20th century as a Gothic cathedral dominated a 13th century landscape. The work of many hands over many years, it universally inspired admiration, wonder and fear.
A. Hunter Dupree
#16. Si monumentum requiris circumspice
(If you seek his monument, look around.)
[Epitaph on Wren's tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral]
Christopher Wren
#17. The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.
Boris Pasternak
#18. All churches are an echo of this - the Cathedral of Nature.
Seth Adam Smith
#19. You can't build a cathedral in a day. A look at the club's history tells you these things take time.
Gerard Houllier
#20. A cathedral without windows, a face without eyes, a field without flowers, an alphabet without vowels, a continent without rivers, a night without stars, and a sky without a sun - these would not be so sad as a ... soul without Christ.
Tad R. Callister
#21. Take three grains of sand and put them in the middle of a vast cathedral. Now the cathedral is as full with sand as the universe is with stars...Most of the universe is empty space!
Vedang Sati
#23. [It is] the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste. the Cathedral of Asphalt.
Robert Moses
#24. I'm never happy with what I've written. You imagine, before you start, there's a cathedral, and the moment it starts on the page, it's a garden shed. And then you just try to make it the best shed you can.
Sadie Jones
#25. It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top.
Bill Bryson
#26. I need to write faster, but I make no promises. I found out long ago that when you look at the overall task, the cathedral you have to build, it looks so daunting that you just give up and sit down and play a video game.
George R R Martin
#27. The arts speak across epochs. If you think that people started to build a cathedral in 1315 and the people worked on that cathedral, it wasn't going to be finished until 1585. So they were thinking 200 years from now. Maybe by the time I die, this wall might be put up.
Wynton Marsalis
#29. A story is like building a chapel; a novel is a cathedral ...
Rosario Ferre
#30. You talk about her as if she is the Notre Dame Cathedral!" "She is. And the Statue of Liberty and Abbey Road and the best burrito of your life. Didn't you know?
Barbara Kingsolver
#31. I love Spanish cities, particularly Barcelona, Madrid and Palma, which has the most amazing cathedral that I once went to for a wedding.
Louise Nurding
#32. And other times there would be tenderness and holding-close liek a warm bath, and hands stroking my hair and brow, and the words carved about the cathedral of my childhood: 'He's like all the other children. He's a good boy.
Daniel Keyes
#33. The images did not quite mesh, but they were very unsettling, as if you had entered a cathedral for high mass and found people copulating on the altar. Brian,
Jeff Lindsay
#34. [On Rachmaninoff:] He was the most Russian of them all, like a cathedral in the snow. Holy, wintry, infinite, he was all the Russias.
Dagmar Godowsky
#35. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it, we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.
Neal Stephenson
#36. My faith grew strong, and I sent a letter (as I was ordered) to the Rev. Dignitary of the Cathedral of Exeter. I was assured, before I sent it, he would not answer it.
Joanna Southcott
#37. As a boy soprano in the high school choir, I later sang a solo during the carol service at Canterbury Cathedral, but I was too young to secure the Freddy Eynsford-Hill role in our production of 'My Fair Lady' - and far too timid to have thought to audition for it.
Hamish Bowles
#38. [He] was an insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had become.
Vernor Vinge
#39. I believe that love is better than hate. And that there is more nobility in building a chicken coop than in destroying a cathedral.
Betty Greene
#40. Kindness is the color in the cathedral window which woven into beautiful characters shuts out the hideous sights of a world which is all too practical.
James Leonard Gordon
#41. I think that when Lady Tamarind looks at you, she feels as the cathedral might if it suddenly remembered that once it had been a grim little church facing down musket fire and a cruel sea wind.
Frances Hardinge
#42. All my life, I've been trying to fill an emptiness inside. But that emptiness ... I've built myself around it. Filling it in would be like filling in the empty space within a cathedral.
Blake Charlton
#43. If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired Cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystic light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially.
Don DeLillo
#44. Maimed but still magnificent ... Europe's mightiest medieval cathedral.
R. W. Apple Jr.
#45. It's not just the books Alba craves, it's standing inside a place that houses millions of them. Libraries are Alba's churches, and the university library, containing one edition of every book ever published in England, is her cathedral.
Menna Van Praag
#46. Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?
Ian McEwan
#47. Action shouldn't just be seeing all those crashes. You can blow up a cathedral; next time you blow up the Great Wall of China, and then what? But when you're in love with your characters, the smallest action becomes an important action.
Michelle Yeoh
#48. We are ... living in a free society without the faith that built that society - and without the conviction and dedication needed to sustain it ... We still have the cathedral of freedom but how long will it last without the faith?
Thomas Sowell
#49. The sun was just coming up over the mountains--blood red and cold. I felt as if I was standing in the mightiest cathedral that had ever been built. There was no end to it, and no beginning. All I could do was look at it and worship.
Robert Specht
#50. And so we smile on, Feeding the truths we share With a union of our souls, Cathedral slaves of our passion Which builds beauty amongst chaos.
Scott Hastie
#51. We are not a land of Islam. In our country, we don't wear djellaba clothing, we don't wear a veil, and we don't impose cathedral-sized mosques.
Marion Marechal-Le Pen
#52. In this toxic atmosphere, good intentions are eroding like the noses of stone gargoyles on cathedral peaks.
Peter Matthiessen
#53. What did you say, Gram? About there being no church out here?" "I said that the sky was the roof of my cathedral and the desert was its floor and any time I paid attention, I could feel a higher power all around me.
Terri Farley
#54. A complicated structure? Undoubtedly. But after all, the cathedral of Milan is complicated too, and you still look at it with awe.
Kato Lomb
#55. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as single and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet, on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#56. There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Michael Leunig
#57. One Cardinal entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#58. Everything in Tom's cathedral looked as if it was meant to be. Perhaps her life was like that, everything foreordained in a grand design, and she was like a foolish builder who wanted a waterfall in the chancel.
Ken Follett
#59. It was cold, dark & lonely in the great cathedral-like chambers, with only coffins and corpses for company.
Billie-Jo Williams
#60. Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you can see no glory, nor can imagine any, but standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#61. You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm.
Mark Rothko
#62. The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.
William Butler Yeats
#63. She has built her whole life on the foundation of beauty: each chiseled plane, each sloping dimple, each soft curve as crucial as keystones in the cathedral of her body.
Nenia Campbell
#64. Concepts differentiate architecture from mere building ... A bicycle shed with a concept is architecture; a cathedral without one is just a building.
Bernard Tschumi
#65. People use the word "natural" ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the Sunday school teachings.
Timothy Leary
#66. Time is your cathedral. You know the present is only a pretty illusion in the minds of men. And I think you know that nothing has ever passed away, not entirely.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#67. Bondurant was no expert on where sex between consenting adults on cathedral grounds fit in the grand hierarchy of sins in the Catholic faith. But he figured it must be high up the ladder of mortal sins, ones that required serious contrition and confession to a priest. Bondurant
John Heubusch
#68. Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianity, there are vines, animals, creatures and birds thriving all over the stonework.
Margaret Atwood
#69. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful.
Francis Collins
#70. God's signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own. Yet the prayers of private suffering, whether in our homes or in this great cathedral, are known and heard, and understood.
George W. Bush
#71. I'll leave a note to the rector of the cathedral and remind him that a woman gave him birth. Something for him to think about the next time he gives one of his sermons. I'm writing all this down.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#72. This is my greatest obstacle, the biggest of all the boulders littering my path. In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, it all collapses.
Isaac Marion
#73. The forest is the first cathedral. I felt that from the time I was a child. I credit my mother with that. I used to think it came from her Native-American side. Whichever it was, she instinctively connected with nature, and taught me that.
Alice Walker
#74. The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones
#75. We are material creatures who spend much of our lives on material pursuits (even building a cathedral or writing a novel requires stone and mortar or paper and ink).
Virginia Postrel
#76. Joe Dugan, who was my roommate on the Yankees, was an honorary pallbearer, too. He was standing next to me as they were carrying the Babe down the steps of St. Pat's Cathedral here in New York. There must have been 5,000 people standing around on the sides of the street, and it was tremendous.
Waite Hoyt
#77. Like a couple of peasants huddled together in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Jack and Eliza performed their role in the Mass and then departed, leaving no sign that they'd ever been there, save perhaps for an evanescent ripple in the coursing tide of quicksilver.
Neal Stephenson
#78. For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it's all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that's the definition of spectacle.
Diane Paulus
#79. Grandeur ... consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof.
Charles Kingsley
#80. who looked like a kid lining up for the teacups at Disneyland. "You're sure we have to go down through the cathedral to get to the hospital?" said Elise.
Mark Frost
#81. I am absolutely enraptured by the atmosphere of a wreck. A dead ship is the house of a tremendous amount of life-fish and plants. The mixture of life and death is mysterious, even religious. There is the same sense of peace and mood that you feel on entering a cathedral.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
#84. The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can't cut corners.
Dave Eggers
#85. Nobody has ever called Shea Stadium a cathedral. In style, it was more like the old warehouse or outdated movie theater that Korean worshippers have transformed into a church in the borough of Queens. Not a cathedral - but a place where people go to be fulfilled, nonetheless.
George Vecsey
#86. The poor priest went to his poor mountaineers with empty hands, and he returns from them with his hands full. I set out bearing only my faith in God; I have brought back the treasure of a cathedral.
Victor Hugo
#87. Human beings, for some reason or another, like symmetry. You leave a bunch of them next to a jungle for a couple of days and you'll come back to find an ornamental garden. We take stones and turn them into the Taj Mahal or St. Paul's Cathedral.
Mark Forsyth
#88. I once worked it out - after $12 million, all millionaires are the same. That's because we're all humans, confined to human scale. How many homes can you live in? How many meals can you eat? You can have a living room the size of a cathedral, but you won't live in it. It's too big.
Ricardo Semler
#89. How do you open the eyes to see how to take the daily, domestic, workday vortex and invert it into the dome of an everyday cathedral?
Ann Voskamp
#90. We thought of universities as the cathedrals of the modern world. In the middle ages, the cathedral was the center and symbol of the city. In the modern world, its place could be taken by the university.
Roger Revelle
#91. Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#93. Cathedral Close, when I got to St Leonard's, was emptier than a Sally Army collection box at a Pride festival,
J.L. Merrow
#94. In the immense cathedral which is the universe of God, each person, whether scholar or manual laborer, is called to act as the priest of his whole life
to take all that is human, and to turn it into an offering and a hymn of glory.
Paul Evdokimov
#96. Unless you're an astronaut, it's not the work we do that inspires us either. It's the cause we come to work for. We don't want to come to work to build a wall, we want to come to work to build a cathedral.
Simon Sinek
#97. The Crystal Cathedral is not an attempt to be an architectural ego-statement. It's probably the ultimate spiritual and psychological statement that could be made in architectural terms.
Robert H. Schuller
#98. Sex wasn't God's big mistake. Judging against sex was humanity's big mistake. Pleasure is as divine as any cathedral, any temple.
Deepak Chopra
#100. He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
Sinclair Lewis
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