Cathedrals Quotes - Page 7

• [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

  True Identity, Trying, Vastness

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• A parable: A man was examining the construction of a cathedral. He asked a stone mason what he was doing chipping the stones, and the mason replied, "I am making stones." He asked a stone carver what he was doing. "I am carving a gargoyle." And so it went, each person said in detail what they were doing. Finally he came to an old woman who was sweeping the ground. She said. "I am helping build a cathedral." ...Most of the time each person is immersed in the details of one special part of the whole and does not think of how what they are doing relates to the larger picture.

  Richard Hamming

  Science, Men, Thinking

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• The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin.

  Cornell Woolrich

  Writing, Venus De Milo, Creative

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• 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. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, planted at the base of Manhattan island with the Statue of Liberty as their sentry, and the Pentagon, a squat, concrete fort on the banks of the Potomac, are the sanctuaries of money and power that our enemies may imagine define us. But that assumes our faith rests on what we can buy and build, and that has never been America's true God.

  Nancy Gibbs

  Powerful, Humble, America

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• You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, Dark, Fire

  "Michael Cunningham: A life in writing" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. February 7, 2011.

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• 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

  Heaven, Earth, Rooms

  "Anselm Kiefer’s Remembrance of Things Past" by Kisa Lala, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 19, 2010.

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• 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

  Beautiful, Clothes, People

  Interview with Robert Murphy, wwd.com. October 1, 2008.

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• 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

  Passion, Soul, Unions

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• What is a roofless cathedral
  to a well-built pie?

  William Maginn

  Pie, Wells, Built

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• I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

  Philip Johnson

  Design, Wish, Ask Me

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• 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

  Generations, Looks, Thrill

  "Architect Philip Johnson Dies at 98". www.foxnews.com. January 26, 2005.

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

  W. H. Auden

  Luxury, Soul, Hull

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• Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Art, Character, Mean

  Frank Lloyd Wright (1992). “Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-1932”, Rizzoli International Publications

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• O never harm the dreaming world, the world of green, the world of leaves, but let its million palms unfold the adoration of the trees Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest. A vast and majestic tree is greater than that.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Dream, Art, Men

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• 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

  Hands, Pyramids, People

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• I call this my church house trilogy. Souls' Chapel really was music from the Mississippi Delta, which to me is a church within itself. The Delta is the church of American Roots music. The Badlands is a cathedral without a top on it. And the Ryman has been called the Mother Church of Country Music, but to me it's the Mother Church of American Music. If you can think it up, it's been done there. In my mind, this is kind of a spiritual odyssey as much as anything else, and I had the settings of three churches to make it in.

  Marty Stuart

  Country, Mother, Spiritual

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• Religious liberty in a nation is as real as the liberty of its least popular religious minority. Look not to the size of cathedrals or even to the words on the statute books for proof of the reality of religious freedom. Ask what is the fate of the Protestant in Spain, the Jew in Saudi Arabia, the Arab in Israel, the Catholic in Poland or the atheist in the United States.

  Paul Blanshard

  Religious, Atheist, Real

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• I believe that the tragedy [like terror attack] that's caused so much grief and suffering to so many thousands and thousands of people has also served as a call to action, because many people now are re-examining their own value systems, and the churches, temples, mosques and cathedrals are packed to overflowing for the first time in years.

  Jane Goodall

  Grief, Believe, Years

  Source: www.cnn.com

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• There is a great deal more correctness of thought respecting manhood in bodily things than in moral things. For men's ideas of manhood shape themselves as the tower and spire of cathedrals do, that stand broad at the bottom, but grow tapering as they rise, and end, far up, in the finest lines, and in an evanishing point. Where they touch the ground they are most, and where they reach to the heaven they are least.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Men, Ideas, Heaven

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 404, 1895.

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• The confusion of spirit and body is quite understandable in a culture where spirit is concretized in magnificent skyscrapers, where cathedrals have become museums for tourists, where woman-flesh-devil are associated, and nature is raped for any deplorable excuse. Dieting with fierce will-power is the masculine route; dieting with love of her own nature is the feminine. Her only real hope is to care for her own body and experience it as the vessel through which her Self may be born.

  Marion Woodman

  Real, Museums, Self

  "The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter". Book by Marion Woodman, 1980.

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• The Hindu religion appears ... as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Real, Unseen, Details

  Sri Aurobindo (1970). “Letters on Yoga”, Lotus Press (WI)

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• 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

  Silence, Church, Dams

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• To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved.

  Osamu Dazai

  Love, Lying, Fall

  Osamu Dazai (1973). “No Longer Human”, p.47, New Directions Publishing

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• Let brothers and sisters from one end of the world, speak in all brotherly love, all affection, and one sweetness, to their brothers and sisters in the other extremity of the world. Then we shall succeed in rearing up one vast cathedral in this world, where men of all nations and races shall glorify the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.

  Keshub Chandra Sen

  Brother, Men, Race

  Sermon preached at Mill-hill Chapel, Leeds, August 28, 1870.

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• Every age manifests itself by some external evidence. In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the greatest numbers-it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.

  Charles Sheeler

  Religious, Expression, Numbers

  Charles Brock, Charles Sheeler, National Gallery of Art (U.S.), Art Institute of Chicago, M.H. De Young Memorial Museum (2006). “Charles Sheeler: across media”, University of California Press

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