Quotes About Ritual

I carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden.

The only destiny with which we are born is the destiny of ritual. I have been calling "mask" a lie, and it isn't: it is the essential mask of solemnity. We would have to put on ritual masks to love each other. Beetles are born with the mask with which they will fulfill themselves. Through original sin we have lost our mask.

He who emphasizes the ritual of faith can lose the point of faith.

I am the priestess of a secret that I no longer know. And I serve out of blissful ignorance. I found out something I was unable to understand, my lips became sealed, and I retained only the incomprehensible fragments of a ritual.

Put simply, all religion is anthropocentric.

Religion is what you do and what you are.

Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is.

A ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.

The Jewish Sabbath may be too hard for some people, or they may not subscribe to its ideas; but within its own terms it is a dramatic ceremony penetrating all of life. It is not simply a day off. This demanding rite turns twenty-four hours of every week into a separated time, apart in mood, texture, acts, and events from daily existence.

What for do we nail down the dead?

Rouge, also, had a peculiar function as caste-mark. It was applied with a heavy hand and in a circular pattern. It was worn most lavishly on the day of a woman's debut, when she was obliged to simulate the flush of the contrived orgasm bestowed by royal favour.

I always say a little prayer when I put cakes in the oven," remarked Eve, as she stopped to kiss Rose good-bye. "What do you say?" "I say, 'Please, God, don't let me forget I've put that cake in the oven.

Do you think it (hedgehog) can possibly have gone to Heaven?" This was Ruth's ritual question when confronted with death and Naomi was always firm. "No", she said at once. "Because what would it do when it got there? Eat slugs and snails that had gone to hell? It's just died, that's all. No good getting all drippy about it.

MURRY: Resolutions are a complete waste of time. They're just this meaningless ritual, empty promises we make and break within hours of each other.

It was a vow, a piece of a chant, their scripture, something they took so seriously that saying it aloud embarrassed them.

After every battle, he ritually dips his hood into the blood of his enemies. I've seen the hood, kept under glass in the armory. The fabric is stiff and stained a brown so deep it's almost black, except for a few smears of green. Sometimes I go down and stare at it, trying to see my parents in the tide lines of dried blood. I want to feel something, something besides a vague queasiness. I want to feel more, but every time I look at it, I feel less.

every night for seven months and seven days, he must bring her a cube of fresh human flesh. He may cut it from himself or from another, whichever he prefers.

because she might have already kissed him before. No. He pressed his thumb in between her eyebrows. What was he doing? Was it some sort of weird middle-aged-people ritual? Was she meant to do it back to him?

Like any normal cat Madame Phloi lived by the Rule of Three. She resisted any innovation three times before accepting it, tackled an obstacle three times before giving up, and tried each activity three times before tiring of it.

Surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions.

He said surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions.

He said it aloud, in a great ringing voice. Yuth-Kaathak ngom'm! Ygar naa Ithorthak! Sh'ayaa Ubb nagarr'nya Ib! Ib-nya gryalak!

At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason.

The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult.