Top 100 Quotes About Cathedrals: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Cathedrals

#1. The secret of great cathedrals is that their proportions conform to cosmic laws, 'shaping' people who spend time in them.

Theodor Schwenk

#2. Our horizon is the creation of a noble society to which, like the medieval builder of those glorious cathedrals, you will have added your conception, your artful piece of stone.

Adrienne Clarkson

#3. To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#4. Sometimes I wish that I could sing or dance or paint or compose symphonies or build cathedrals to express somehow what all of this means to me. I wish I were a priest or a robin or a child or a sunset.

Robert Benson

#5. Ruins are the cathedrals of Time.

Marty Rubin

#6. Cathedrals are an unassailable witness to human passion. Using what demented calculation could an animal build such places? I think we know. An animal with a gorgeous genius for hope.

Lionel Tiger

#7. Many men build as cathedrals are built-the part nearest the ground finished, but that part which soars toward heaven, the turrets and the spires, forever incomplete.

Henry Ward Beecher

#8. What is the crowning glory of your civilization ... the symbol as clear a statement as the pyramids, the Parthenon, the cathedrals? What is this symbol? What is its name? Its name is Junk. Junk is the rusty, lovely, brilliant symbol of the dying years of your time. Junk is your ultimate landscape.

George Nelson

#9. I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own.

Billy Joel

#10. As regards my own 'philosophy,' I continue to be inspired by the music, liturgy and architectural tradition of the Anglican Church in which I was brought up. No one can fail to be uplifted by great cathedrals - such as that at Ely, near my home in Cambridge.

Martin Rees

#11. Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals.

Theodore Zeldin

#12. In those small towns you come to realize how the cathedrals utterly outgrew their whole environment.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#13. The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

C.S. Lewis

#14. It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: - and the spiritual precedes the material.

Alfred North Whitehead

#15. Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry

Sam Kean

#16. Art used to be made in the name of faith. We made cathedrals, we made stained-glass windows, we made murals.

Julia Cameron

#17. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.

John Muir

#18. The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.

Georges Bataille

#19. In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

Umberto Eco

#20. Religious figures, gargoyles, and grotesques, she though, looked fine on Gothic cathedrals, but she'd always spent more time looking at the murals inside the buildings than the carvings outside.
So why did this one seem to have captured all her attention?

Christine Warren

#21. All through history, a nation or a civilization's enduring glory is articulated by its mega constructions - the pyramids, the lofty cathedrals of the Christian world.

F. Sionil Jose

#22. The British Isles are awash with the choice of beautiful historic churches, abbeys, and cathedrals where one king or another has tied the knot and bestowed a royal precedent.

Tina Brown

#23. Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#24. Navigation is about wayfinding, you can't treat it as separate because many other things run parallel with it. If you look at studies in wayfinding, everything from exhibit design to building the cathedrals, it's about creating a complete system. It's about looking at the whole.

Clement Mok

#25. Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

Janet Frame

#26. The men who began their life's work on [the cathedrals], they never lived to see the completion of their work.

Raymond Carver

#27. I love church buildings, particularly cathedrals, and I like living in spaces that remind me of music or evoke that creative energy.

Laura Mvula

#28. There is a reason we used to build Cathedrals that drew the eye upwards.

Michael Gungor

#29. That's how they made them years ago, before metal strings, before they knew how to brace a long neck. It's incredible. There's more careful engineering in that swan neck than in any three cathedrals.

Patrick Rothfuss

#30. Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters.

David Byrne

#31. Most buildings, whether they're Gothic cathedrals or Romanesque ones, were high tech for their time.

Richard Rogers

#32. Large motorway flyovers are the cathedrals of the modern world.

Barbara Castle, Baroness Castle Of Blackburn

#33. Like the wide hollows of eyes marked in cathedrals of stone that left me half-perplexed as a child. A self-portrait of an innocent in this organic of ephemeral societies. Then I know I will be able to flourish viciously. That's the trouble with remembering. You begin to wish.

Abigail George

#34. Almost succeeded in single-handedly shooing the faithful out of their pews in the French cathedrals. Unfortunately for him, this notion of God the Creator is nearly as rampant in the world today as it was when the first prophet sat down to put words in God's mouth.

Jesse Bering

#35. Clea and I were touring one of the cathedrals in Italy, and in front of the whole tour I go 'That's so cute! Look, they have birdbaths in the church!

Hilary Duff

#36. The flame in her was slow and deep-he was going to incite it with the fire in himself; he was going to make a blaze to burn down cities, to lay waste cathedrals and castles and plain meetinghouses-to make a world where it was only him, and only her, and this bed, and one flesh.

Laura Kinsale

#37. Ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. "See this? Part of my DNA, sort of. . . ." He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. "You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines.

William Gibson

#38. We spend more time at cinemas, theaters, art galleries and theme parks than we do at churches, and they have become our new cathedrals. We can spend hours at any of these places of entertainment but if church service goes on too long we get impatient.

Michael Huffington

#39. All great cathedrals began their building by the placement of a single stone. The building unit of a great society is the individual.

L. Ron Hubbard

#40. Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.

Charles Baudelaire

#41. I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

Roland Barthes

#42. Mass production is nothing new. Weren't cathedrals built through mass production? The pyramids? ... Paintings can be painted with the left hand, the right hand, someone else's hand, or many people's hands. The scale of production is irrelevant to its content.

Ai Weiwei

#43. Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.

Virginia Woolf

#44. One may as well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

John Muir

#45. Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

David Lodge

#46. I dream of diving in two places where I have not been yet. One is Antarctica, because of its crystal clear waters and amazing fauna, in addition to the ice cathedrals. The other is the Arctic, where I'd like to see the northernmost kelp forests.

Enric Sala

#47. The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

Thomas Carlyle

#48. Inside a religious body you get sects and hierarchies, inside an information network you get bazaars and cathedrals, it is the same, call them what you like. They survive by pointing the finger of blame at each other.

Mary Douglas

#49. Big machines are the awe-inspiring cathedrals of the 20th century.

Daniel Kleppner

#50. Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman - not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen - though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying.

Anthony Bourdain

#51. History and beauty lie in the baroque wrinkles of old cathedrals. mosques, synagogues, temples and faces whose stories are told without a single word.

Khang Kijarro Nguyen

#52. The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.

Caitlin Doughty

#53. Not even the most secular among us can fail to be uplifted by Christianity's architectural legacy - the great cathedrals. These immense and glorious buildings were erected in an era of constricted horizons, both in time and in space.

Martin Rees

#54. Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshiped by man.

Tom Rachman

#55. The Peace Panda Says: Without The Heartfelt Prayer Of Love And Compassion ... Even The Greatest Of Temples, Mosques, Synagogues and Cathedrals Of Humanity Are Spiritually Dead. What is Humanity Without It's Spirit?

Timothy Pina

#56. If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.

C.S. Lewis

#57. Italy valued cathedrals while Spain valued explorers. So worldwide, five times as many people speak Spanish than Italian.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#58. These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don't have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.

Jimmy Buffett

#59. We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.

Andrew Hunt

#60. If you want to humble an empire, it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe.

Nancy Gibbs

#61. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

Richard Dawkins

#62. In the same way that cathedrals have always aroused in me the sensation of extreme light-headedness one often feels in the presence of man-made tributes to the glory of something that does not exist,

Muriel Barbery

#63. My icons do not raise up the blessed savior in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.

Dan Flavin

#64. There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.

John Ruskin

#65. The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.

Kenneth Clark

#66. 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

#67. Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring. (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)

Jonathan Haidt

#68. It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

#69. I feel comfortable singing in the great cathedrals of the world because I spent so much time as a child singing in church. And it isn't very different. Of course, nothing looks quite like Notre Dame de Paris.

Jessye Norman

#70. He said, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry out." Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the facades of the mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces and open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out.

G.K. Chesterton

#71. Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music ... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle - but that's exactly what art is for.

Ha-Joon Chang

#72. Liturgy and worship were never meant to be confined to the cathedrals and sanctuaries. Liturgy at its best can be performed like a circus or theater - making the Gospel visible as a witness to the world around us.

Shane Claiborne

#73. Western cathedrals and abbeys ... through soaring Gothic architecture, [give] us at floor level a sense of belonging within (but unable at the moment to inhabit more than a little of) great spaces of light and beauty, into which, significantly, only our music can penetrate.

N. T. Wright

#74. 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

#75. If we operate with a belief in long sweeps of time, we build cathedrals; if we operate from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter, we build ugly shopping malls.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

#76. It's the Lord's space and the Lord's worlds in space, Father. We must not try to take our cathedrals with us, when all we need is an overnight case.

Ray Bradbury

#77. The Palestinian state is within our grasp. Soon the Palestinian flag will fly on the walls, the minarets and the cathedrals of Jerusalem.

Yasser Arafat

#78. When your field is architecture, you go visit the great cathedrals of the world. My field was relationships. I got married many times. I was practicing. I didn't date much; I just would get married. I thought, why waste time?

Barbara De Angelis

#79. Two bricklayers work side by side. The first lays bricks. The second builds magnificent cathedrals. Think small vs. think big.

Richard Branson

#80. Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.

Anatoli Boukreev

#81. Fear God, and where you go men shall think they walk in hallowed cathedrals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#82. The structure echoed the greatest cathedrals of Earth and Mars, rising up through empty air and giving both thrust-gravity stability and glory to God.

James S.A. Corey

#83. The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

#84. [ELIZA]
You and your words flooded my senses, your sentences left me defenseless. You built me palaces out of paragraphs, you built cathedrals.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

#85. I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

Philip Schultz

#86. There was, indeed, no life. Stillness and silence ruled here. In fact Tiffany, who cared a lot about getting words right, would have said it was a hush, which is not the same as silence. A hush is what you get in cathedrals at midnight.

Terry Pratchett

#87. For we have come by different ways to this place ... I can tell by the natural ease with which you wear fine clothes and the way your mouth moves when you speak with waiters in good restaurants. You have come the way of castles and cathedrals, of elegance and empire.

Robert James Waller

#88. I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals - grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to the unknown god.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#89. Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.

Aleksandar Hemon

#90. Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.

W. H. Auden

#91. Cathedrals are built with pennies of the faithful. A great opera house also is a spiritual center, a temple of sorts, where many gather together for recreation, education, and inspiration - a blessed trinity worthy of public support.

Eleanor Robson Belmont