Rite Quotes

• Every positive change - every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness - involves a rite of passage. Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception.

  Dan Millman

  Change, Courage, Energy

  Dan Millman (1992). “No Ordinary Moments: A Peaceful Warrior's Guide to Daily Life”, p.81, H J Kramer

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• The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.

  Pete Townshend

  Writing, Rocks, Rock And Roll

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• KISS, n. A word invented by the poets as a rhyme for "bliss." It is supposed to signify, in a general way, some kind of rite or ceremony appertaining to a good understanding; but the manner of its performance is unknown to this lexicographer.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Kissing, Understanding, Lexicographer

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.120, 谷月社

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• My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.

  Winston Churchill

  Drinking, Beer, Funny Sarcastic

  Uttered during a lunch with the Arab leader, Ibn Saud

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• As artists and traders in medieval cities began to form organizations, they instituted tough initiation ceremonies. Journeymen in Bergen, Norway, were shoved down a chimney, thrown three times into the sea, and soundly whipped. Such rites made belonging to the guild or corporation more precious to those who were accepted, and survived.

  Isaac Asimov

  Artist, Sea, Cities

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• Lovers can do their amorous rites by their own beauties

  William Shakespeare

  Love, Romantic Romeo And Juliet, Amorous

  William Shakespeare (1853). “The life and beauties of Shakespeare: comprising careful selections from each play, with a general index, digesting them under proper heads”, p.294

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• It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.

  Joseph Campbell

  Spirit, Prime, Function

  Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.7, New World Library

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• The Roman Pontiffs have always...held that all those rites should be preserved which deviate neither from accuracy in matters of faith, nor from what is fitting.

  Pope Pius IX

  Matter, Fitting, Should

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• Every ceremony or rite has a value if it is performed without alteration. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.

  G. I. Gurdjieff

  Book, Hundred, Ceremony

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• The real important function of the church is to present the symbol, to perform the rite, to let you behold this divine message in such a way that you are capable of experiencing it. What the relationship of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost to each other might be, in technical terms, is not half important as you, the celebrant, feeling the Virgin Birth within you, the birth of the mystic, mythic being that is your own spiritual life.

  Joseph Campbell

  Spiritual, Father, Real

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• Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.

  Confucius

  Punishment, People, Reform

  Confucius (1992). “Confucius: The Analects”

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• But there were some things I believed in. Some things I had faith in. And faith isn't about perfect attendance to services, or how much money you put on the little plate. It isn't about going skyclad to the Holy Rites, or meditating each day upon the divine. Faith is about what you do. It's about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It's about making sacrifices for the good of others - even when there's not going to be anyone telling you what a hero you are.

  Jim Butcher

  Hero, Sacrifice, Perfect

  Jim Butcher (2010). “Changes: A Novel of the Dresden Files”, p.167, Penguin

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• JOSS-STICKS- Small sticks burned by the Chinese in their pagan tomfoolery, in imitation of certain sacred rites of our holy religion.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Chinese, Religion, Sacred

  Ambrose Bierce (1906). “The Cynic's Word Book”, p.207, Lulu.com

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• Condemned and executioner with aren't coupled in a primitive rite.

  Tanith Lee

  Executioners, Primitive

  "Sabella".

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• RITE, n. A religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept or custom, with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Religious, Oil, Law

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.203, University of Georgia Press

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• One must observe the proper rites.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Ritual

  Antoine De Saint-Exupery (2015). “The Little Prince: "Illustrated Edition"”, p.87, eKitap Projesi

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• When many people are killed, they should be mourned and lamented. Those who are victorious in war should follow the rites of funerals.

  Laozi

  War, People, Funeral

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• They say funerals are not for the dead but for the living. Those rites are what permit you to move on, so if you don't deal with the remains, you can never deal with the memories. That might be true; we may have walked in their dust down on Venice Minor, but it's not the same as a proper good-bye.

  Ann Aguirre

  Memories, Moving, Dust

  Ann Aguirre (2011). “Aftermath”, p.41, Penguin

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• Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Religious, Men, Hunting

  Jose Ortega y Gasset (2007). “Meditations on Hunting”, p.106, Wilderness Adventures Press

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• Even while Jerusalem was standing and the Jews were at peace with us, the practice of their sacred rites was at variance with the glory of our empire, the dignity of our name, the customs of our ancestors.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Practice, Names, Jerusalem

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• The rite of passage of learning to build a fire that will burn all night with one match is not an insignificant one in my husband’s family, and I grew up camping and backpacking. I love to camp.

  Sarah Wayne Callies

  Love, Husband, Night

  "Q&A – Sarah Wayne Callies (Lori Grimes)". Interview with Brian Fegter, www.amc.com.

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• I would not go so far as to say that vaccination has never saved a person from smallpox. It is a matter of record that thousands of the victims of this superstitious rite have been saved from smallpox by the immunizing potency of death. But it is a fact that the official statistics of England and Wales show unmistakably that, while vaccination has killed ten times more people than smallpox, there has been a decrease in smallpox concomitant with the decrease in vaccination. . . It might be appropriately asked, in the words of the Vaccination Inquirer

  Herbert M. Shelton

  Vaccines, People, Records

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• For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Trying, Withdrawal

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• When my father finally got around to teaching me to drive, he was impressed at my "natural" talent for driving, not knowing that I had already been secretly driving my mother's car around the neighborhood. When I took the test and got my license and my father gave me my own set of keys to the car one night at dinner, it was a major rite of passage for him and my mother. Their perception of me had changed and was formally acknowledged. For me the occasion meant a private sanction to do in public what I had already been doing in secret.

  Robert Fulghum

  Mother, Father, Teaching

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• In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.

  William Robertson Smith

  Religion, Savages, May

  William Robertson Smith (1907). “Religion of the Semites (Ppr)”, p.55, Transaction Publishers

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