Ritual Quotes - Page 18

• I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

  Kenneth Clark

  Hurt, Kindness, Believe

  Kenneth Clark, British Broadcasting Corporation (1970). “Civilization”, London : British Broadcasting Corporation

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• Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments, and The Doors are looking for such a ritual also. A kind of electric wedding. We hide ourselves in the music to reveal ourselves.

  Jim Morrison

  Doors, Cities, Kind

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• 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

  Spiritual, Men, Dancing

  Andre Dubus (2010). “The Times Are Never So Bad: A Novella and Eight Short Stories”, p.121, Open Road Media

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• Religions have found that if you behave in a certain way, if you sort of perform certain rituals that expand your mind and make you realize that will make you realize and help you to seguey into transcendence and perform certain acts, adopt a certain lifestyle, you develop new capacities of mind and heart, just like the dancer, or the athlete that make you into a whole human being and principle after one of these disciplines right across the board in all of the faiths is compassion, the ability to feel with the other person.

  Karen Armstrong

  Athlete, Heart, Compassion

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• The sense of being Jewish never left me, but when my grandmother died, I rebelled against Judaism as I knew it then, which was Orthodox. I saw the rituals, a lot of them, as very male, for a long time.

  Marge Piercy

  Grandmother, Long, Males

  "Fighting Words". Interview with Johnette Rodriguez, margepiercy.com. September 27, 2002.

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• The most meaningful movies I can make are the ones where parents can share them with their children and children can look forward to sharing them with their parents, a ritual if you will, where they get to spend time together and the kids are smiling.

  Nicolas Cage

  Meaningful, Children, Kids

  "Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel's Magical Apprenticeship". Moviefone Interview, news1.capitalgrio.com. July 13, 2010.

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• The purpose of ritual is to change the mind of the human being. It's a sacred drama in which you are the audience as well as the participant, and the purpose of it is to activate the parts of the mind that are not activated by everyday activity ... 'Magic' becomes the development of techniques that allow communication with hidden portions of the self, and with hidden portions of all other islands in this 'psychic sea.'

  Margot Adler

  Drama, Communication, Sea

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• 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

  Collective Unconscious, Brain, Mind

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• It is also absolutely correct that some British folk customs have descended directly from pagan rituals, such ... the giving of presents and decoration of homes with greenery at midwinter.

  Ronald Hutton

  Christmas, Home, Giving

  Ronald Hutton (2001). “The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft”, p.211, OUP Oxford

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• In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.

  R. D. Laing

  Our Society, Lost

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• Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Religious, Pain, Feelings

  H.P. Lovecraft (2012). “The Complete Fiction Collection vol III”, p.502, Lulu.com

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• Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.

  William James

  Philosophy, Mean, Men

  William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.114, University of Illinois Press

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• 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

  Book, Thinking, Other Worlds

  "An Autobiography". Book by Jawaharlal Nehru, 1936.

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• It was part of theTexas ritual? We know about champagne and caviar but we talk hog and hominy.

  Edna Ferber

  Caviar, Champagne, Hog

  1952 Giant, ch.2.

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• Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

  Walter Benjamin

  Art, Dependence, Reproduction

  "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Book by Walter Benjamin, 1939.

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• If you exchanged wedding vows, tape them to your bathroom mirror and read them aloud to yourself every morning along with the ritual brushing of teeth. It's not realistic to believe that you will live your promises as a daily practice -- unless you're a saint or a highly evolved Zen Buddhist. Not where marriage is concerned. But you can make a practice of returning to your vows when the going gets rough.

  Harriet Lerner

  Buddhist, Morning, Believe

  "Returning To Your Wedding Vows" by Harriet Lerner, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 2, 2012.

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• Women's scars and rituals involved beauty (piercing ears and noses, binding feet, and wearing corsets); men's involved protecting women. In cultures in which physical strength is still the best way to protect women, as among the Dodos in Uganda, each time a man kills a man, he is awarded a ritual scar; the more scars, the more he is considered eligible.

  Warren Farrell

  Men, Feet, Uganda

  "The Myth of Male Power". Book by Warren Farrell, 1993.

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• It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects... and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple.

  Anatol Rapoport

  Dwelling, Temples, Purpose

  "Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space" by Michael Parker Pearson, ‎Colin Richards, (p. 49), 2003.

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• I've studied Kabbalah, as you know, for many years, so there are a lot of things I do that one would associate with practising Judaism. I hear the Torah every Saturday. I observe Shabbat. I say certain prayers. My son was bar mitzvahed. So this appears like I'm Jewish, but these rituals are connected to what I describe as the Tree of Life consciousness and have more to do with the idea of being an Israelite, not Jewish.

  Madonna Ciccone

  Prayer, Son, Years

  Source: www.independent.ie

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• But we must not forget, this ritual expressed, certain ideas which lie at the very root of true religion, the fellowship of the worshippers with one another in their fellowship with the deity, and the consecration of the bonds of kinship as the type of all right ethical relations between man and man.

  William Robertson Smith

  Religious, Lying, Men

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• We can love religion as we need rituals, but The Holy Spirit is a bird, free to fly and land where it likes. We don't actually need 'religion' in order to have a relationship with The Holy Spirit. Too many wars an violence over religion.We need to see it's all the same spirit and we are part of that spirit so we shouldn't be fighting over what name we call it. It's a free bird.

  Sinead O'Connor

  War, Fighting, Order

  "Sinead O'Connor on Pope Benedict and Catholic abuse scandal". Live chat, www.washingtonpost.com. March 26, 2010.

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• Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness.

  Stanislav Grof

  Technology, Use, Substance

  Stanislav Grof (1998). “The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness”, p.260, SUNY Press

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• In a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king--but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem with democratic rituals is homologous to the great problem of constitutional monarchy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively makes decisions, when we all know this not to be true?

  Slavoj Žižek

  Kings, Decision, Democracy

  Slavoj Žižek (2009). “First As Tragedy, Then As Farce”, p.134, Verso

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• The only [working] ritual is making tea. I use the loose leaves and drink it by the gallon.

  Stephen King

  Tea, Use, Drink

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• One of the delights of the new age is that it's a turning of consciousness to give us permission to look beyond appearances. But there are traps that come with it. It's brave to throw off the old altars and churches and ceremonies that kept us from discovery, it's not so brave to replace them with chants and rituals and new priests who are retreads of the old.

  Richard Bach

  Discovery, Giving, Brave

  Interview with Michael Peter Langevin, www.inner-growth.info.

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