Top 100 Cathedral Quotes
#1. Everything was flame shades of tangerine and pomegranate, ripeness on the brink of decay, and when the wind rippled the leaves they looked like a mosaic of fire, like the walls of the Cathedral Basilica.
Leah Raeder
#3. Cathedral terminology was like stage directions - totally counterintuitive.
Dan Brown
#4. There was a much smaller room on the other side. It was merely the size of, say, a cathedral. And it was lined floor to ceiling with more hourglasses that Susan could just see dimly in the light from the big room. She stepped inside and snapped her fingers.
Terry Pratchett
#5. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.
Bill Bryson
#6. Oh, if there were only a true religion. Fool that I am, I see a Gothic cathedral and venerable stained-glass windows, and my weak heart conjures up the priest to fit the scene. My soul would understand him, my soul has need of him. I only find a nincompoop with dirty hair.
Stendhal
#7. A dirty, joyous, bare-limbed freedom, which rose in his imagination like a vast airy cathedral, ruined perhaps, roofless, fan-vaulted to the skies, where they would weightlessly drift upward in a powerful embrace ...
Ian McEwan
#8. While passing through an obscure nook of Notre Dame cathedral, Victor Hugo noticed the Greek work for fate carved in the stone. He imagined a tormented soul driven to engrave this word. From this seed sprang his monumental novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Alexander Steele
#9. The little cathedral made with matchsticks is attracted to the earth, so to make a comparison the big cathedral should be attracted to an even bigger earth. Too bad. A bigger earth would attract it even more, and the sticks would break even more surely!
Richard Feynman
#10. The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#11. A writer writes alone in a room with no distractions. The minute he's distracted he loses the cathedral in which he must perform, which is himself.
Shane Solerno
#12. I think there's definitely a potential there for a congregation to survive without the Crystal Cathedral. The congregation is the people. It's not the building.
Robert A. Schuller
#13. A grove of giant redwood or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral.
Theodore Roosevelt
#14. I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#15. In the cathedral of my heart a candle will always be lit for you.
Hardy Kruger
#16. It seemed she was in a cathedral - if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone.
Laini Taylor
#17. It was a small church. No large cathedral towers overshadowed the purpose of the house of worship. It was a monument to faith rather than a monument to man's triumph over nature.
Richard W. Kelly
#18. In a small cathedral town where changes are few, there are always people who remember who used to live in a particular house, what happened to them there and afterwards, and so on.
James Hilton
#19. He felt his faith deeply, and above all out of doors, where the vaulted sky was his cathedral nave and the oaks its transept pillars: when faith failed, as it sometimes did, he saw the heavens declare the glory of God and heard the stones cry out.
Sarah Perry
#20. The gilded spiral
Of longings within.
Our very own cathedral
That points persistently to heaven.
Scott Hastie
#21. I'm not a preacher, and I'm certainly not a good example, but I have my own feelings about God. I'm kind of a nature guy. My cathedral is forests, or the prairies, or the beach.
Neil Young
#22. I sang at the Inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral.
Michael W. Smith
#23. Tread softly as you draw near to the bedside of a dying man, for the space around him is holy ground. Speak in hushed tones, with awe and reverence, as you would in a cathedral. Let not the mind engage in trivial thoughts. The awesome majesty of Death can only be met in silence.
Jennifer Worth
#24. A peaceful home is as sacred a place as any chapel or cathedral.
Bil Keane
#25. The public library building, in my view, is just a little lower than the church, the cathedral, the temple, the synagogue and the mosque. Within those walls and along those stacks, I have found security and assurance.
Maya Angelou
#26. A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
Marcel Proust
#27. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands.
Virginia Woolf
#28. [Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity ... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral ...
Coleman Barks
#29. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages ...
Hermann Hesse
#30. The opera ... is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
H.L. Mencken
#31. Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth," he says, "set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the center. Straight to where you should be.
Hilary Mantel
#32. As often as I have witnessed the miracle [birth], held the perfect creature with its tiny hands and feet, each time I have felt as though I were entering a cathedral with prayer in my heart.
Margaret Sanger
#33. Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.
Tony Campolo
#34. I have a feeling of reverence about my father being in his 80s - a feeling that I want to whisper, take soft steps, not intrude too much. He's like a stately old cathedral to me now.
Patti Davis
#35. Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and woman how the human and the divine love could go hand in hand.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones
#36. Peace is not just the absence of war. Like a cathedral, peace must be constructed patiently and with unshakable faith.
Pope John Paul II
#38. Five days a week I drive from our home to the Episcopal Cathedral Center of Los Angeles where I have an office, my computer, and a wonderful sense of community - especially nurtured by the presence of several younger gay men and women who are good friends.
Malcolm Boyd
#39. I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.
Philip Johnson
#40. They decided to no longer air my messages on 'The Hour of Power.' They felt they could have greater impact if they had lots of different preachers. 'The Hour of Power' owns the Crystal Cathedral, and the owners, in effect, evicted me ... so that they could have other preachers on Sunday mornings.
Robert A. Schuller
#41. People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.
Heinrich Heine
#42. If you tell the story you will live the story. If you live the story you have to own the story. If you dont like the story your living, stop telling it.
Virginia Johnston-Dodds
#43. Temple and cathedral are attractive because they spatially and acoustically recreate the cave, where early humans first expressed their spiritual yearnings.
David Byrne
#44. But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting;
Marcel Proust
#45. A savage desire for strong emotions and sensations burns inside me: a rage against this soft-tinted, shallow, standardized and sterilized life, and a mad craving to smash something up, a department store, say, or a cathedral, or myself.
Anonymous
#46. It makes you feel sort of cheap and titchy. Like it's looking down at you, saying, I'm Canterbury Cathedral, who the hell are you?
Graham Swift
#47. The library became the cathedral where I would come to worship amd the stories were as precious to me as prayers.
Anita Anand
#48. Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. - David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral
Daniel C. Dennett
#49. I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.
Susan Vreeland
#50. I found lines that mirrored an ache and longing I had so often felt when the beauty around my woods cathedral was too intense, when the need to grasp and keep loveliness left me with a sense of desolate frustration.
Irene Hunt
#51. I bought into Saks as a personal investment because, when I was a young man and went to America for the first time, it seemed to me that Saks was like a cathedral of retail. I never dreamt that I could one day be a part of it. And now I am.
Diego Della Valle
#52. The years of old age are stalls in the cathedral of life in which for aged men to sit and listen and meditate and be patient till the service is over, and in which they may get themselves ready to say "Amen" at the last, with all their hearts and souls and strength.
William Mountford
#53. You've picked up a rummy habit," James Banister said cordially as they approached one another. "Sort of a crouch. You look a bit ... well, I'm sorry, but you look a bit Victor Hugo, if you catch my drift. Would you like to adjourn to a cathedral or something?
Nick Harkaway
#54. He visited the cathedral, and sat in its chilled light, pouring like water from above. He reminded himself that centuries ago men had built churches, bridges, and ships, all of them a leap of madness and faith, if you thought about it.
Rachel Joyce
#55. The Christmas market at the Barcelona Cathedral sells all kinds of things for your Nativity scene. It will also give you a good idea of Catalan culture.
Jose Andres
#56. Michal too would catch one last glimpse of him in a dream. In 1958 she told a friend: I dreamt of Charles the other night. He was standing on a niche in a cathedral I could not identify. His garments were beyond whiteness & he looked very very grave & he looked & looked at me.1526
Grevel Lindop
#57. It is easy to turn our religious life into a cathedral for beautiful memories, but there are feet to be washed ...
Oswald Chambers
#58. A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose.
Richard Dawkins
#59. Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.
James Jeans
#60. I like the thought that what we are to do on this earth is embellish it for its greater beauty, so that oncoming generations can look back to the shapes we leave here and get the same thrill that I get in looking back at theirs - at the Parthenon, at Chartres Cathedral.
Philip Johnson
#61. DEAD FLIES ON THE SILLS OF sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty. The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist's wax, the organ has been gutted.
James Salter
#62. An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.
Jerome Lawrence
#63. The pursuit of peace resembles the building of a great cathedral. It is the work of a generation. In concept it requires a mater-architect; in execution, the labors of many.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#64. Up ahead are a forest of searchlights. A thicket of long thin smoking beams pivoting back and forth. Stabbing at the darkness. Making of the sky a kind of dome as though V Victor is about to enter some supernatural cathedral of light.
Glenn Haybittle
#65. But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.
Minoru Yamasaki
#66. It seemed to give shape to the open air, or rather to reveal the hidden architecture that was there all along - the invisible cathedral that vaulted over the surface of the pond - known only to sparrows and dragonflies but invisible to the human eye.
Amor Towles
#67. Everyone takes a turn, and when it gets to me, I shout out what Jewish people say at times like this: "L'chaim!"
"It means 'to life,'" I explain. And as I say it, I think that maybe this is what I was saying a prayer for back in the cathedral. To life.
Gayle Forman
#68. When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then - and not until then - will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#69. A martyr is, he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God. The martyr no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of martyrdom.
T. S. Eliot
#70. The cathedral, at its noblest, is the best outward symbol of the spiritual nature of man, as it is also the most suggestive measure and prophecy of the corporate life of man.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones
#71. I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.
Violette Leduc
#72. As a child, I was always intrigued by the question: what is it that distinguishes a city from a town? Is it size? Population? Location? When I asked grown-ups, the confident answer was that a city has to have a cathedral - which, to a child raised in a devout Catholic setting, made sense.
John Burnside
#73. The perfume of the flowers and of the bay tree are wafted on high, like incense. The birds sing sweet songs of praise to their Creator. In the tops of the trees, the soughing of the wind is like the hushed prayers of the multitude in some vast cathedral. Here the heart of man becomes impressionable.
William Wendt
#74. Step by step, a path; stone by stone, a cathedral,' my great-grandfather used to say.
Phil Cousineau
#75. Music is a holy place, a cathedral so majestic that we can sense the magnificence of the universe, and also a hovel so simple and private that none of us can plumb its deepest secrets.
Don Campbell
#76. I grew up in a forest. It's like a room. It's protected. Like a cathedral ... it is a place between heaven and earth.
Anselm Kiefer
#77. The heavy bell of St. Paul's cathedral rang out, announcing the death of another day.
Charles Dickens
#78. Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.
Henry A. Kissinger
#79. Matt raised an eyebrow. Tour the Greek cathedral, huh? We can call it that, if you want. Sure.
Jessica Park
#80. She couldn't see him, but his voice was like light through a stained-glass window in a cathedral.
Graham Joyce
#81. It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
Robert Hughes
#82. Mountains had taken the place of religion, had satisfied her religious sense, her need for adoration and worship as no service in any Cathedral, however sublime, had been able to do ...
Ann Bridge
#83. On August 19, 1418, a competition was announced in Florence, where the city's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, had been under construction for more than a century
Ross King
#84. As we drew nearer I saw a cathedral like a crown on the head of a city. In its white walls every window glinted in the sun. Lincoln! Of such places is England made. -No Moon Tonight
Don Charlwood
#85. To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#86. He who bears in his heart a cathedral to be built is already victorious. He who seeks to become sexton of a finished cathedral is already defeated.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#87. There's a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of cathedral tunes.
Emily Dickinson
#88. I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral.
Joseph Conrad
#89. I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil - or perhaps a saint - out of stone.
Ingmar Bergman
#90. Words mean what they're generally believed to mean. When Charles II saw Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral for the first time, he called it "awful, pompous, and artificial." Meaning roughly: Awesome, majestic, and ingenious.
S.M. Stirling
#91. We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#93. In cathedral or cottage, the art of worship is an inner adventure; it is the personal practice of the presence of God.
Wilferd Peterson
#95. You need a plan for everything, whether it's building a cathedral or a chicken coop. Without a plan, you'll postpone living until you're dead.
John Goddard
#96. Once upon a time, chimaera descended by the thousands into a cathedral beneath the earth. And never left.
Laini Taylor
#97. The sun,
the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man
burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray.
Charles Dickens
#98. afterlife, the space between earth and not-earth, world and not-world, highly polished floors and glass-roof cathedral echoes and the whole anonymous
Donna Tartt
#99. His love was an architect that entirely remade the reality of the chapel, transforming it into a cathedral as grand as any in the world.
Dean Koontz
#100. I'm not a religious person. But, when I look at a beautiful cathedral, what brings awe, what induces awe is the idea that architecture, you know, a beautiful cathedral, a beautiful building.
Jason Silva
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