Ritual Quotes - Page 7

• Since the nature of people is bad, to become corrected they must be taught by teachers and to be orderly they must acquire ritual and moral principles.

  Xunzi

  Teacher, Nature, People

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• We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.

  Abraham Verghese

  Motivation, Believe, Inspiration

  "A doctor's touch". TED Talks, www.ted.com. July 2011.

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• The thing you fail to grasp is that people are not basically good. We are basically selfish. We shove and clamour and cry for adoration, and beat down everyone else to get it. Life is a competition of prattling peacocks enraptured in inane mating rituals. But for all our effacing and self-importance, we are all slaves to what we fear most. You have so very much to learn. Here. Let me teach you.

  Christopher Nolan

  Selfish, People, Competition

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• Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over all. Purgation was replaced by the purge.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Religious, Real, Practice

  J. M. Coetzee (1999). “Disgrâce”, Random House (UK)

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• 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

  Mother, Dad, Feelings

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• She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.

  Ruth Reichl

  People, Kitchen, Hungry

  Ruth Reichl (2011). “Tender At The Bone”, p.34, Random House

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• That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother's palm and fingertips, he was also removing all traces of any tiny leftover parts, and suddenly a ritual which I'd always found incestuous and gross seemed to me more like a desperate act on Joseph's part to get out, to leave, to extract every little last remnant and bring it into open air.

  Aimee Bender

  Mother, Air, Details

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• The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

  Wendell Berry

  Differences, Perfect, Movement

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.12, Counterpoint

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• Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

  Jonathan Maberry

  Wall, Heart, Civilization

  Jonathan Maberry (2012). “Dust & Decay”, p.437, Simon and Schuster

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• In the center stood a marble alter, where a kid in a toga was doing some sort of ritual in front of a massive golden statue of the big dude himself:Jupiter the sky god, dressed in a silk XXXL purple toga, holding a lightning bolt. "It doesn't look like that," Percy muttered. "What?" Hazel asked. "The master bolt," Percy said. "What are you talking about?" "I-" Percy frowned. For a second, he'd thought he remembered something. Now it was gone. "Nothing, I guess.

  Rick Riordan

  Kids, Talking, Sky

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• Lying in bed, half-covered by the blankets, I would drowsily ask why he had come to my door that night long ago. It had become a ritual for us, as it does for all lovers: where, when, why? remember...I understand even old people rehearse their private religion of how they first loved, most guarded of secrets. And he would answer, sleep blurring his words, "Because I had to." The question and the answer were always the same. Why? Because I had to.

  Margaret George

  Lying, Sleep, Night

  Margaret George (2010). “The Memoirs of Cleopatra: A Novel”, p.751, Macmillan

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• I am so used to hints and mixed messages, saying things that might mean what they sort of sound like they mean. Games and contests, roles and rituals, talking in twelve languages at once so the true words won't be so obvious. I am not used to a plainspoken, honest truth.

  David Levithan

  Mean, Talking, Games

  David Levithan (2009). “Boy Meets Boy”, p.26, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• Today's Gypsies, who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads' fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of roughhewn wood like a child's laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer's eye and soul.

  Bohumil Hrabal

  Children, Eye, Fire

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• I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.

  John Green

  Religious, Ideas, Action

  John Green (2015). “Looking For Alaska Special 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.147, Penguin

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• Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

  William Gaddis

  Heart, Drawing, Hands

  William Gaddis (1955). “The Recognitions: A Novel”

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• 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

  Religious, Food, Cooking

  Pearl Bailey (1973). “Pearl's Kitchen: An Extraordinary Cookbook”, Harcourt

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• These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.

  Joan D. Vinge

  Eye, Age, Comfort

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• The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship

  Jonathan Haidt

  Atheist, Practice, Faces

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• Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.

  Alice Munro

  Children, Awkward, Only Child

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• Lord Raziel. Surely yoy would not have allowed such a thing as a ritual by wich you might be summoned to exist if you did not intend to be summoned. We Nephilim are your children. We need your guidance

  Cassandra Clare

  Children, Nephilim, Needs

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• This world belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn't challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?

  Ken Kesey

  Wise, Strong, Law

  Ken Kesey (2016). “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”, p.33, Hamilton Books

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• Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos-a cult of two with fallible gods.

  Diane Ackerman

  Inspirational, Couple, Jigsaw Puzzles

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir”, p.15, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I remember sitting at the end of my mum's bed being fascinated by her ritual of getting dressed. It was a very methodical and considered process. I suppose you could say she was my first real muse.

  Matthew Williamson

  Fashion, Real, Bed

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• This is criterion by which the Church is to be judged, not by the forms of its doctrine or ritual, but by the reality of the reality of the love which it manifests.

  Bede Griffiths

  Spiritual, Reality, Church

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• The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Honor, Criticism

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