Quotes About Ritual

Every morning I read the obituaries. If it ain't there I make myself a cup of tea and carry on like I have the past century or so.

Seriously, why was it tradition to stand when the bride came in? It blocked her from seeing her groom, who was the only reason she was there in the first place.

Habit is a form of exercise.

sotto le cenere, beans in a flask braised under ash. Now he's pouring the cooled, herb-scented beans from all the flasks into a huge white bowl, drizzling on more oil and tossing them. When everyone is seated he and his wife will carry the bowl together, passing the creamy-fleshed beans table to table, person to person, just like his grandparents used to do.

Gentleman. A man who buys two of the same morning paper from the doorman of his favorite nightclub when he leaves with his girl.

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.

If anyone that Sunday suggested that there was an element of the sacred to her ritual, she likely would have disagreed. There was no open Bible. No sanctified cloth. No preacher or even professors substituting for a divinely inspired voice. Not even a candlestick before her. This ceremony was liturgy of a different order. If her desk were indeed an altar, it was a shrine not to God, but to words.

They are sitting shiva, Monsieur Trudeau," I said. "That is a seven-day ritual. They cannot transact business during those seven days." "Preposterous!" Again his voice rose. "We should let the scientific exploration of Mars fall behind for some primitive superstition? The body is buried, man, move on.

La civilisation, telle que je l'entends, repose sur le café et les journaux, et leur parfum.

Tantrics seek oneness with the universe through eating meat, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, dancing, and ritual sexual intercourse.

Puesto que la carne es el alimento más prestigioso y universalmente deseado por los seres humanos, es también el alimento más prestigioso y universalmente deseado por los dioses.

The holy person111 is completely holy, including the person's body. The holy person who takes up bread consecrates it, and does the same with the cup or anything else the person takes up and consecrates.112 So how would the person not consecrate the body also?

Feeding is a form of love. He might not have said it, but the ritual must have comforted him.

church organist for the past twenty-one years, stroked the last notes of "Faith of Our Fathers." The next several minutes were ritual Catholic routine—up, down, sit, up, down, sit. When the calisthenics ended, Father Benedict stood before the pulpit and gazed out at his congregation.

When love begins to sicken and decay it uses an enforced ceremony.

The ritual of marriage is not simply a social event; it is a crossing of threads in the fabric of fate. Many strands bring the couple and their families together and spin their lives into a fabric that is woven on their children.

In olden times, sacrifices were made at the altar, a practice that still continues.

If you go to war pray once; if you go on a sea journey pray twice; but pray three times if you are going to be married

They made four hundred and five of these little tobacco bundles, one for each of the different plants, "our

Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea.

The jazz funeral celebrates the fact that the person who died is free now to dance on the other side.

and so we persist in using suboptimized measurements out of superstition and habit.

Alexias) 'You burned this and you kept no copy?' (Plato) 'When one offers to the gods, one brings a whole beast to the altar. If it was an image of what is not, then it was false and ought to be destroyed; and if of what is, then a little fire will not destroy it.

The tea seemed to be making things better. It was a hot drink made of leaves, used in times of crisis as a means of restoring normality.