Top 100 Ritual Quotes
#1. Eating together is an occasion that humans have made into a peacemaking ritual;
Paul Theroux
#2. War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.
Arthur Koestler
#3. However, current research in animal cognition, and on protolanguage, protomorality, ritual, and levels of consciousness, has shown that we may not be as unique as we think we are (cf. Peterson 1999: 283ff.).
J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen
#4. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
Salman Rushdie
#5. The time I spend in the morning - praying, sipping coffee, and coming up with my list - is a ritual I relish. I have done it for so long now that I subconsciously measure whether or not the things I'm doing match with what I should be doing, what I want to be doing, and the life I want to live.
Kristin Armstrong
#6. And the process, the ritual, quieted the hum of his mind so he could write.
James Renner
#7. This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the convivial exchanges of strangers from different backgrounds sharing ideas on the sidewalk.
Steven Johnson
#9. There is a single main definition of the object of all magical Ritual. It is the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. The Supreme and Complete Ritual is therefore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of Mysticism, Union with God.
Aleister Crowley
#10. The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.
Michael Pollan
#11. Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization
carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language ...
Diane Wakoski
#12. But, you know, they don't enjoy the dinner hour together. It's just not as much of a ritual at night and it's interesting. I think the ritual is taking place perhaps more in the morning.
Katie Couric
#13. Virtual worlds are places of imagination that encompass practices of play, performance, creativity and ritual.
Tom Boellstorff
#14. I get very excited when I go to a show - there are all these people who don't know each another who've come together to celebrate this amazing ritual. The making of community that theater provides is quite profound.
Hugh Hardy
#15. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.
Andre Dubus
#16. The best trick I learned was when a priest came to me when I was an altar boy and said, "Always, when you make a mistake, pretend it's ritual." It's beautiful!
Ragnar Kjartansson
#17. The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.
Ray Bradbury
#18. Not everyone is comfortable with the kissing ritual. My husband is one of them. Her refuses to press lips with anyone except his wife, mother, and dog. If someone wanted to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he would refuse until he had been formally introduced.
Erma Bombeck
#19. I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I'm working in the morning, I don't allow myself a cup of tea until I've written two paragraphs. It's harsh.
Anthony Lane
#20. Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires.
Simone De Beauvoir
#21. The Egyptians have always been deeply impressed by the fact of human mortality, and much of their religious belief and religious ritual is taken up with the rites of burial, and detailed doctrines as to the experience of the soul after parting from the body.
Anonymous
#22. Conversion is not completing a ritual, it is commencing a relationship. The assurance of ritual is based on accurate words and memory. The assurance of relationship is based on a present posture of repentance and belief.
J.D. Greear
#23. Do I observe holy days and holidays? Yeah, the ritual is very important to me. It's part of being Ukrainian Catholic. So every holy day we're baking pierogis and not eating meat.
Vera Farmiga
#24. We don't have too much ritual in our life anymore. And these life symbols which people rely on to keep their feeling of well being, that life is not too bad after all are required more and more.
John Hench
#25. It's become something of a ritual - every year, Google publishes its year-end summary of what the world wants, and every year I complain about how shallow it is, given what Google really knows about what the world is up to.
John Battelle
#26. Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not
Richard Dawkins
#27. In every religion there are three parts: philosophy, mythology, and ritual. Philosophy
Swami Vivekananda
#28. Shaving my head was a millennium ritual, to not let it pass as just another New Year's Eve. A lot has happened to me in the last couple of years, personally and spiritually. I wanted to mark it for myself.
Joan Jett
#29. Every day my mother had tea. My dad has his ritual cigar. They had their evening cocktail. Those rituals were done nicely, with flair and feeling.
John Travolta
#30. I think as much as we're cyber connecting it's really nice to just sit and talk, and have that ritual.
Kate Walsh
#31. The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.
Ross Douthat
#32. Resurrection, he thought, comes not by plan or effort, and should the past ever come alive, it will be a great surprise, in which images and ritual memory will pale.
Mark Helprin
#33. Therefore, a person should first be changed by a teacher's instructions, and guided by principles of ritual. Only then can he observe the rules of courtesy and humility, obey the conventions and rules of society, and achieve order.
Xun Zi
#34. Some people use bullfights, some the Mass, some art in order to ritualize or transform death into life or at least meaning. But my terror is that life itself is a ritual transforming everything into death.
Marilyn French
#36. British actors wear wigs a lot. I find it to be a nice ritual at the end of the day, take the wig off, clean the makeup off, go home, leave work behind me.
Megan Boone
#37. There are numerous historical reports as well as visual images that link mushroom consumption to the ritual of sacrifice. These include bloodletting, penis perforation, and even the improbable act of self-decapitation.
John Rush
#38. Rituals, Al Decided, were a lot like numbers; they offered a comforting solidity in the otherwise chaotic floodtide of life. But it was more than that. A ritual was a way to hold time - not freezing it, rather the opposite, warming it through the touch of your imagination.
Erica Bauermeister
#39. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.
Sylvia Plath
#40. Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it's a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker.
Michael Chabon
#41. The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us, to put it to work. The old ones inside us, the collective unconscious, the many lives, the divine eternal parts, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored.
Zsuzsanna Budapest
#42. I don't know why, but Putin has made a ritual out of humiliating Medvedev. Sometimes I even feel sorry for the prime minister.
Alexei Navalny
#43. For the first time i began to think, consciously and deliberately of religion and other worlds. The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation; not the ritual or ceremonial part, but it's great books, the "Upnishads", and the "Bhagavad Gita".
Jawaharlal Nehru
#44. As the conjugal act cannot be spoken of aloud for reasons both sacred and profane, the ritual of the pipe was, for the pair of them, a holy ritual that was unspeakable and mortified, just as it was ecstatic and divine: its sacredness lay in its very profanity, and its profanity, in its sacred form.
Eleanor Catton
#45. Like dogs who sniff each other when meeting, chess players have a ritual at first acquaintance: they sit down to play speed chess.
Anatoly Karpov
#46. Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.
-Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.
Frank Herbert
#47. The skaters a lot of times do their own hair and makeup before they compete. That was always kind of a ritual ... that calming, quiet time where you can just do your hair and makeup. And then I would always lace up my right skate before my left one.
Kristi Yamaguchi
#49. Feeding is a very important ritual for me. I don't trust people who don't like to eat.
Gina Gershon
#50. The ritual of families watching TV together passed into antiquity around the time I was my son's age; that was when households tended to have a single television and when the choices of what to watch were manageable.
Steve Erickson
#51. When I go and work with people, I never say, 'Your dog is changed for the rest of its life.' It's like a diet. You've got to maintain a discipline and ritual in your life to keep a certain figure.
Cesar Millan
#52. I pray. I try to find space to process with a walk on the beach, a hike in the hills. Nature is restorative. I also try not to overreact. I grew up in Ireland, and we are big tea drinkers, and I think it's less about the tea itself and more about the ritual and the moment to prepare.
Roma Downey
#53. Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#54. Ritual of the Ashes," the Occitan prayer of the dead, which
Nina George
#55. Time passed. Art came off the walls and became rituals. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present, mindless trajectory, could land those lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.
Tom Robbins
#56. Y'all drinking whiskey is probably a gregarious act. When you're not an alcoholic it's pretty fun to drink whiskey. But when you are it's a very solo ritual. It's not gregarious at all. But vice has always informed country music and all music.
Ketch Secor
#57. An aphorism is a mental exercise, psychical, logical, linguistic, spiritual, ritual, emotional and rational, it is a major conceptual and literary activity, a mixture of prose and poetry that conveys, in addition to ideology, sympathy or antipathy.
William C. Brown
#58. I love the ritual of drawing up lists, and there's something wonderfully satisfying about ticking tasks off.
Shaida Kazie Ali
#59. My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.
Chuck Palahniuk
#60. Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life.
Gretel Ehrlich
#61. Ritual isn't a New World strong point.
John Graves
#62. I'm for prayer in the schools because ritual and ceremony are calming and civilizing, and the little fartlings should be tamped down whenever possible.
Florence King
#63. I step through origins
like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat:
the bog floor shakes,
water cheeps and lisps
as I walk down
rushes and heather.
I love this turf-face,
it's black incisions,
the cooped secrets
of process and ritual:
-Kinship
Seamus Heaney
#64. We always get up about 5:30, and George gets up and goes in and gets the coffee and brings it to me, and that's been our ritual since we got married. And we read the newspapers in bed and drink coffee for about an hour probably, read our briefing papers.
Laura Bush
#65. Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.
Thomas Ligotti
#66. I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.
Miller Williams
#67. An entire greased-up baby being squirted out of a gay biker's asshole during a weird gay biker sex ritual. I guess the word weird isn't really necessary there.
Anonymous
#68. I wonder what my baby is thinking at this moment, he called, rubbing his stomach with his hands. What I was thinking about was whether or not his being my mother was going to wreck my nightly friction ritual.
Wally Lamb
#69. The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.
Erich Fromm
#70. It was something they'd done a thousand times before. If Jamie went surfing with a mate and paddled in first, he always took time for that final wave. And there was something so familiar in the ritual that for a moment he felt like everything was right.
He felt forgiven.
Kirsty Eagar
#71. Our backyard looked like a marketplace. Valuable objects, precious rugs, silver candlesticks, Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty grounds- pitiful relics that seemed never to have had a home. All this under a magnificent blue sky.
Elie Wiesel
#72. My own skin-care ritual is quite simple and straightforward; I don't like a lot of fuss, surprisingly. My products are designed to make you look and feel better. I think there are a lot of men out there who want and need the same products.
Tom Ford
#73. I would advise anyone who is at the start of a rest ritual like the Sabbath, to take it slowly and grow incrementally into it. Recognize that it will be hard at first. It's a discipline but then it is a true and deep joy.
Erica Brown
#74. Catholic ritual of Sancta Missa: " 'Come in haste to assist them, you saints of God. Come in haste to meet them, you angels of the Lord. Enfold in your arms these souls, and take your burden heavenward to the most high.
Mitch Albom
#75. Scaremongering is an age-old political ritual. There are public officials who have benefited by playing up the 'hacker threat' so that they can win approval by cracking down on it.
Charles Platt
#76. we have forgotten that we were born
of celestial cataclysm.
we have forgotten how to dance
bare-footed on the earth to the cadence
of our souls. we have forgotten the ritual
fires and the acrid tang of holy smoke
on our tongues.
Beth Morey
#77. The true shaman, the true naturalist, works to reconnect conscious human life with Nature and Spirit through totems and ritual.
Ted Andrews
#78. Truth without enthusiasm, morality without emotion, ritual without soul, are things Christ unsparingly condemned. Destitute of fire, they are nothing more than a godless philosophy, an ethical system, and a superstition.
Samuel Chadwick
#79. Jewish cantors employ a peculiar art and method of singing in their delivery. They are unexcelled in the art of covering the voice, picking up a new key, in the treatment of the ritual chant, and overcoming vocal difficulties that lie in the words rather than in the music.
Enrico Caruso
#80. There is no ceremony, no initiation ritual, no secret hand-shake. All you need to be a writer is to write.
M. Kirin
#81. Eddie got in. Roland paused for a moment to tap his throat three times. Eddie had seen him perform this ritual before when about to cross open water, and reminded himself to ask about it. He never got the chance; before the question occurred to him again, death had slipped between them.
Stephen King
#82. The ritual denunciation of the so-called 'socialist' states is replete with distortions and often outright lies.
Noam Chomsky
#83. Christianity is not a system of philosophy, nor a ritual, nor a code of laws; it is the impartation of a divine vitality. Without the way there is no going, without the truth there is no knowing, without life there is no living.
Merrill C. Tenney
#84. I'll give you my routine, my morning ritual: I get up, I do a bit of stretching, and then after showering and everything, I have a half cup of warm lemon water. I've been doing that forever. I love it. It just brightens everything for me.
Grace Hightower
#85. Sophia Mercer," Elodie intoned, "we have come to induct you into our sisterhood. Say the five words to begin the ritual."
I blinked at her. "Are you freaking kidding me?"
Anna gave an exasperated sigh. "No, the five words are 'I accept you offer, sisters.
Rachel Hawkins
#86. I think the prom is very serious also. It's an American ritual, it's a rite of passage, and it's very much a part of this country.
Mary Ellen Mark
#87. I don't have a special place or ritual for writing songs, basically I write songs whenever an idea hits me, in my hotel room, on the road, in the plane.
Kelly Jones
#88. I've come to understand that there's a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It's hard to say good- bye and almost impossible to accomplish this alone and ritual is the railing we hold to, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past.
William Kent Krueger
#89. Symbology and ritual, at best, can only mimic the Truth ... and cannot, and never has had, any mastery over the manifestations of Divinity.
Gabriel Brunsdon
#90. MacLean has shown that the R-complex plays an important role in aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritual and the establishment of social hierarchies. Despite occasional welcome exceptions, this seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior.
Carl Sagan
#91. Then the God punished, "I will give the happiest moments at such worst times that you won't be able to feel anything."
Take it as a punishment you want
Because this ritual of mine will always haunt
Bhavik Sarkhedi
#92. On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man's need for collective art and ritual.
Erich Fromm
#93. Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.
W.P. Kinsella
#94. I start every morning with a Rosicrucian ritual, meditation and exercise. I can't separate myself from this habit of connecting myself to the other realm every day, not anymore, because I'm actually more there than here. I always was, but now I know how to maintain this balance, even in solitude.
Robin Sacredfire
#95. Yeah ... I finally understood it ...
That exchanging information ...
Sharing time ...
The act of "let's go to the bathroom together" was the holy ritual of confirming one's friendship ...
Until now I was an idiot doing stupid things.
Taishi Zaou, Eiki Eiki
#96. Kia ora meant hello. Tana was man, wahine woman. She learned that you did not say "thank you" but showed your gratitude through actions and that the Maori did not shake hands in greeting but rubbed noses instead. This ritual was called hongi
Sarah Lark
#97. He had breath in him once," he declared. "He is to be treated with respect, no matter the cost." "Now is not the time for empty ritual," Holmes thundered. "Now is precisely the time!" Douglas thundered back. "When we ourselves are empty, it is the ritual that turns us human again.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#98. Human material culture - the buildings and roads and works that would strike any human as an obvious sign of intelligence - had for years seemed like part of an elaborate mating ritual to the starlings, useless and flamboyant as the peacock's tail.
Joe Pitkin
#99. The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love.
Bell Hooks
#100. Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
Neil Gaiman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
