Quotes About Rituals

#1. No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

Stephen Greenblatt

#2. Lieux de memoire ... 'exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are lieux de memoire? [They] are ... vestiges ... the rituals of a ritual-less society.

Tony Judt

#3. We each have a litany of holiday rituals and everyday habits that we hold on to, and we often greet radical innovation with the enthusiasm of a baby meeting a new sitter. We defend against it and - not always, but often enough - reject it. Slowly we adjust, but only if we have to.

Ellen Goodman

#4. Whether we're conscious of it or not, our work and personal lives are made up of daily rituals, including when we eat our meals, how we shower or groom, or how we approach our daily descent into the digital world of email communication.

Chip Conley

#5. Seventh of the Rituals of Radiant Living: the Ritual of Music.

Robin S. Sharma

#6. It's no easy business to be simple.

Gustave Flaubert

#7. Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier.

J.M. Coetzee

#8. ... there is faith and faith. One form of faith is actual practice - the rituals and so on - the other form of faith involves actually believing in it.

Alexander McCall Smith

#9. Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.

Joseph Campbell

#10. Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

Abraham Verghese

#11. Well I wasn't really attacking the religious beliefs, I was attacking the formality of the rituals of the Catholic church; however, people took it wrongly.

Tom Lehrer

#12. God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all - no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.

Ronald J. Sider

#13. The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd.

Angela Carter

#14. I may never recover. It was like an out-of-body experience. I'm an alien trying on human rituals.

Susan Juby

#15. The Hopi Indians of Arizona believe that our daily rituals and prayers literally keep this world spinning on its axis. For me, feeding the seagulls is one of those everyday prayers.

Brenda Peterson

#16. Walter Parmenter sometimes seemed to his daughter a restless subterranean force held together by rituals.

Anne Rivers Siddons

#17. not trouble his head about them; he knew that Zamora's religion, like all things of a civilized, longsettled people, was intricate and complex, and had lost most of the pristine essence in a maze of formulas and rituals.

Robert E. Howard

#18. Nothing good ever happens at lunch. The cafeteria is a giant sound stage where they film daily segments of Teenage Humiliation Rituals. And it smells gross.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#19. Religions are all living faiths and their essence does not consist in their externals such as rituals, methods of prayer, ceremonies, etc. It rather consist in the inner beliefs and convictions which they carry along with them and which give their followers a distinctive character and way of life.

Kedar Nath Tiwari

#20. I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me.

Orhan Pamuk

#21. It is not the rituals of worship that please the gods.

Orson Scott Card

#22. Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circumstances.

Susan Cain

#23. She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving ... But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.

Margaret Atwood

#24. Kindness, not rituals, is mankind's greatest prayer.

Debasish Mridha

#25. Rituals are important. Nowadays it's hip not to be married. I'm not interested in being hip.

John Lennon

#26. In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible.

Marina Abramovic

#27. We need rituals for all traumas and loss, whether it is betrayal or infidelity or violence or murder. Ritual helps us heal, and ritual helped me heal and become ready to consider the person who murdered Angela, his story, his pain.

Desmond Tutu

#28. My real desire is to see people live in the modus of our time, to participate in the contemporary world, to release themselves from nostalgia, antiquated traditions, old rituals, meaningless kitsch, and that we be conscious and sensorially attuned to this world in this moment that we are alive.

Karim Rashid

#29. The Quakers pray as the spirit moves them; but to let oneself be moved by the spirit is an arduous business. Kindlier and more worldly churches, with a feeling for human weakness, provide their worshipers with rituals, litanies, beads and prayer wheels.

Aldous Huxley

#30. There is a comfort in rituals, and rituals provide a framework for stability when you are trying to find answers.

Deborah Norville

#31. You could also say that a precious brand often has rituals associated with it. They reinforce the specialness of the brand. And of course the brand owner can help ensure those rituals are created.

Andrew Doyle

#32. On the left hand path we take the direct route, which is much more strenuous, much more dangerous, and much more likely to cause you to fall.

Zeena Schreck

#33. I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

Curtis Sittenfeld

#34. It might kill you to say it, because the film really takes on the Catholic Church, but I do think there is a sort of affection for certain rituals, and an authenticity to the presentation of those rituals, in 'Mea Maxima Culpa.'

Alex Gibney

#35. Ironically, it seems that it is by the means of seemingly perfunctory daily rituals and routines that we enhance the personal relationships that nourish and sustain us.

Kathleen Norris

#36. You'll almost encounter a superstition amongst musicians, people sort of go through strange rituals, what they need to do to write a song.

Dar Williams

#37. The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.

Nick Harkaway

#38. As the world's finest democracy, we do not do guillotines. But there are other less bloody rituals of humiliation, designed to reassure the populace that order is restored, the Republic cleansed.

William Greider

#39. As an Indian, you feel easily connected with certain histories in places like Indonesia, where one sees, because of the presence of the Hindu-Buddhist past, Hindus still living there or Muslims performing rituals that are instantly familiar.

Pankaj Mishra

#40. To make it a habit, do it again and again until it becomes a ritual.

Debasish Mridha

#41. The ultimate objective of such modern mystery school rituals as the Babalon Working of Parsons, and the Alamantra Working of Crowley, was to produce the age of the Antichrist, also called the Aeon of Horus.

David Flynn

#42. He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn't think what else to do. He

Lev Grossman

#43. Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Caroline Knapp

#44. The catechism of the vinyl LP involved a complex series of rituals over sleeves, sides played, needles, fluff and cloths, that were only enhanced by the scents of the record (rather waxy) and cardboard (woodlouse dampish, if anything) that mingled with the actions like incense.

Travis Elborough

#45. Milla Jovovich introduced me to [anthropologist and author of the Don Juan series of books involving shamanic peyote rituals] Carlos Castaneda because I was all into the hallucinogens for a minute.

Michelle Rodriguez

#46. I despise the rituals of fake friendship. I wish we could just claw each other's eyes out and call it a day; instead we put on huge radiant smiles and spout compliments until our teeth hurt from the saccharine sweetness of it all.

Jody Gehrman

#47. Let my worship be within the heart that rejoices,
for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.
Therefore, let there be beauty and strength,
power and compassion, honor and humility,
mirth and reverence within you.

Doreen Valiente

#48. Liberation is an ever shifting horizon, a total ideology that can never fulfill its promises. It has the therapeutic quality of providing emotionally charged rituals of solidarity in hatred - it is the amphetamine of its believers.

Arianna Huffington

#49. Engineering circumstances means you put systems, rituals, rules and/or intentions in place to thwart you in the event you try to procrastinate, delay or even fail to perform the tasks you know would ensure your success.

Honoree Corder

#50. But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you're supposed to do the rituals, you do them.

James S.A. Corey

#51. These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization.

Anais Nin

#52. To criticize one's country is to do it a service ... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism-a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.

J. William Fulbright

#53. In the New Hebrides, any dancer making a mistake was assaulted, wounded, and possibly killed by bowmen posted to keep careful watch for inaccuracies in rituals.

Jamake Highwater

#54. There a series of Catholic rituals and teachings had offered her young life a coherent universe. By 1946, Savannah had for O'Connor ceded to the university world of Iowa, where new influences, including intellectual joys, brought with them questions and skepticism.

Flannery O'Connor

#55. The great help of being in the Army is to understand why are the armies clever in what they describe as emotional intelligence, making soldiers come to terms with the death of comrades by certain rituals.

Antony Beevor

#56. All deities are external manifestation of humanity's internal divinity.

Abhijit Naskar

#57. I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death, of their lovers, friends and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets.

David Wojnarowicz

#58. I write on sacred stories, symbols and rituals of all cultures - European, American and Chinese - but my audiences, typically, like me to focus on India.

Devdutt Pattanaik

#59. The most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favour.

Alan Moore

#60. I'm condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in many ways, including everyday tasks.

Alan Alda

#61. I don't like to say that my kitchen is a religious place, but I would say that if I were a voodoo priestess, I would conduct my rituals there.

Pearl Bailey

#62. I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class

Pat Conroy

#63. For as long as we can trace back human life, there's always been some sort of music - ceremonies, rituals. It's part of the human makeup.

Ingrid Michaelson

#64. My spirituality is parochial, terrestrial. I do qualify as a W.I.T.C.H. , but my irrecular practice and impromptu rituals don't aim at producing any dramatic results except, perhaps, in me.

Stephanie Mills

#65. Be as a seed, a seed for change. Allow my gift to grow and rearrange. Multiple blessings for many. For those with none, let there be plenty. p64

Alexandra Chauran

#66. Rituals are the formulas by which harmony is restored.

Terry Tempest Williams

#67. A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

#68. The Roman Catholic Church and its rituals were so much part of life that, although my parents would often question a small matter of dogma and none of us seemed more religious than anyone else, no one ever questioned the rituals or the basic tenets of belief.

Colm Toibin

#69. I have the greatest love for the rituals of organised religion - the sense of community and belonging it can confer to people. But me, I'm more a questioner than a follower; not by whim or fashion, but as a decision painfully arrived at after much, much thought.

Kabir Bedi

#70. Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.

Siri Hustvedt

#71. The blessing was an empty ritual, she knew, but rituals and ceremonies had power in the eyes of the ignorant.

George R R Martin

#72. I loved Aphrodite from the first and steeped myself in her legends. My mother told me that in ancient times her rituals were bloody and cruel, but I only half believed it.

Erica Jong

#73. Nothing is more repugnant to the human mind in an age of equality than the idea of subjection to forms.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#74. She had witnessed in nauseating detail how the human world worked: its rituals of comfort (television, food, religion); its appetite for poison (television, food, religion); and for the monstrous edifices of desire (television, food, religion): she understood them all.

Clive Barker

#75. I am not a believer in religious rituals. I was brought up in the Arya Samaj environment which taught us to shun rituals. Puja, of course, but simple, elegant and brief.

Dhirubhai Ambani

#76. Many successful people get up before 6am in the morning. They have rituals. They exercise, stretch, organize their day, and walk through that series of rituals.

Brian Tracy

#77. To ward off these disasters, they spent a whole lot of time trying to keep their gods happy via a number of complex rituals, many involving copious amounts of sex ("the gods wish us to have sex" is the oldest pickup line in the world).

Gene Doucette

#78. Rachel was a girl who depended on small, recurrent rituals - that was one of the things he'd come to know about her, and his very ability to identify so specific a trait made him proud of his own capacity for tenderness.

Richard Yates

#79. Rituals are missing nowadays

Russell Brand

#80. Rituals keep us from forgetting what must not be forgotten and keep us rooted in a past from which we must not be disconnected.

Tony Campolo

#81. The call-and-response rituals of geeks were a thing of beauty, and allowed said geeks to identify each other across time and space.

Atom Yang

#82. Rituals are like electrically powered transmitters sending stimulating sparks of electric current or inspirational feelings that connect us to our inner being or soul.

Wes Adamson

#83. Action is the core of everything-7 Rituals to win forever

Anupam Jaiswal

#84. our distinction from the apes has brought us TV, the police, and the rituals of Valentine's Day.

Steve W. Duck

#85. For the current of our spiritual life creeds, rituals and channels that may thwart or help, according to their fixity or openness. When a symbol or spiritual idea becomes rigidly elaborate in its construction, it supplants the idea which it should support.

Rabindranath Tagore

#86. To the Greek mind, the unwillingness to compromise in religious matters - which were not all that important, anyway - was impious, unpatriotic, maybe even seditious. For the Jews, religion was the Way of Life; it had nothing in common with the empty rituals of the Greeks.

Thomas Cahill

#87. For a while, I became an atheist; now that I'm grown up, though, I'm not hard-edged enough to be an atheist. Even though I live with a flaming atheist, I love going to temple. I love all the rituals.

Padma Lakshmi

#88. But the problem was that I had retreated so far into myself - shielding myself from the ghosts and memories of this place - that I had become reliant upon the comfort and rituals and plans.

Jeremy Jackson

#89. In its effect on family relationships, in its facilitation of parental withdrawal from an active role in the socialization of their children, and in its replacement of family rituals and special events, television has played an important role in the disintegration of the American family.

Marie Winn

#90. Religion" (a person's own efforts to find their way to God through being "good" or following rituals) is a poor substitute for true spiritual power: the life of God breathed into a human being, bringing genuine transformation.

Bob Hamp

#91. The natural world is full of females falling hard for stupid male display behavior, including bright feathers, big antlers, and bombastic courtship rituals.

Richard Conniff

#92. Funerals are important rituals. They don't just recognize that a life has ended; they recognize that a life was lived.

Aaron Eckhart

#93. Stressed souls need the reassuring rhythm of self-nurturing rituals.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

#94. Men looked at their gods and their rituals and saw that both were filled with that most terrible of all equations: fear over ambition.

Frank Herbert

#95. Throughout human history, people have developed strong loyalties to traditions, rituals, and symbols. In the most effective organizations, they are not only respected but celebrated. It is no coincidence that the most highly admired corporations are also among the most profitable.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

#96. To the romantic soul, the rituals of Valentine's Day echo every day of the year.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#97. I am in the continual process of transcending fear-based rituals

Robert Downey Jr.

#98. You can't put a price on the rituals of love, because you never know what will happen next. I suppose fear is part of the excitement and we can't have one without the other.

Simon Van Booy

#99. Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, "Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee." (Behold - the only thing greater than yourself.)

Alex Haley

#100. I still noticed that little streak of rebelliousness coming up in me again - the same sense of dissatisfaction I had felt earlier with the empty rituals and institutionalized values of all religious traditions.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche