Quotes About Ritual

Captain Kidd, the privateer, in his voyage over from England in the Adventure had already legally captured a French fishing vessel off the banks of New Foundland with a crew of four. The conquest had resembled more a ritual

I believe that we often disguise pain through ritual and it may be the only solace we have.

Another common error is to identify 'Apollonian' with 'good'—merely because our most respectable sects are all rather Apollonian in ritual and precept. Mere local prejudice.

Culture can only function if we live out the unwanted elements symbolically. All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life. Less healthy ones rely on unconscious expressions: war, violence, psychosomatic illness, neurotic suffering, and accidents are very low-grade ways of living out the shadow. Ceremony and ritual are a far more intelligent means of accomplishing the same thing.

Meaningful ritual and ceremony affirm our relationship to the sacred and nourish both the spiritual and secular worlds. Our inner nature needs acknowledgment from our conscious personality as much as our egos need to remember their source in the collective unconscious.

The Dining Out is a formal affair rooted in ancient history. From pre-Christian Roman legions, to marauding Vikings, to King Arthur's knights, a banquet to celebrate military victories has long been customary among warriors. British soldiers brought the practice to colonial America, where it was adopted by George Washington's army. Close bonds between U.S. Army Air Forces pilots and Royal Air Force (RAF) officers during World War II cemented the custom in the U.S. military.

As these anecdotes illustrate, ritual refers to two kinds of acts: those things we do for the first time that, in fact, have been done by the human race again and again forever—and those patterns that we ourselves repeat again and again because they bring structure and meaning to our individual and collective lives.

This is not just storytelling. It is the sharing of personal mythology. It's how we all make sense out of our lives and give its events significance. It parallels the mythmaking of the human race. It is the ritual of remembrance.

Only at some distance in time and place do you understand the significance of the crossing over—finding in the ritual retelling a way of sanctifying the memory.

For forty years I combed my hair that way, and every time I did, I pushed my mother away from me. There was much she didn't like about my life—and the parting of my hair became a ritual parting of the ways with her.

They don't come to church on Sunday morning to think about new ideas or even the old important ones. They want to hear what they've been told before, with only some small variation on what they've been hearing all their lives, and then they want to go home and eat pot roast and say it was a good service and feel satisfied. But

shoes: that putting them on a bed invited death into the family, that a quarrel would follow if one put on the left shoe first.

LAILA WOULD REMEMBER the muted ceremony in bits and fragments. The cream-colored stripes of Rasheed's suit. The sharp smell of his hair spray. The small shaving nick just above his Adam's apple. The rough pads of his tobacco-stained fingers when he slid the ring on her. The pen. Its not working. The search for a new pen. The contract. The signing, his sure-handed, hers quavering. The prayers. Noticing, in the mirror, that Rasheed had trimmed his eyebrows.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I never leave the house without [my Santa hat]. In fact, I pretty much never leave my room without it. I honestly don't know how this habit started and believe me, I'd break myself of it if I could, but I'm a little bit OCD about the Santa hat. Whenever I try to put it away, I get this horrible, overwhelming feeling that somehow Christmas will be destroyed if I do.

In the pseudoiterative, one performs the ritual of the day attentive to both the joy of the familiar and the shiver of the accidental.

In the pseudoiterative, one performs the ritual of the day attentive to both the joy of the familiar and the shiver of the accidental. To be out at dawn was important.

she keeps a shrine to Sol Invictus in her room, performs the pratahsamdhya ceremony, the salute to the sun, every morning

When everyone was seated they took up the water pitchers and poured each other's water

I worked hard to create such nests of habit, as everybody does, for without habit life would be too abrasive and too long to live.

En Kjøtpudding hører Pensionaternes Verden til, den er en tung Prøvelse paa Fat. Den kunde høve til et uhumsk rituelt Maaltid. Man spiser den med Gaffel eller Øse, saa længe til det ikke er mulig at bli mere bedøvet. Vi Landsfolk vi tygget Kjøtet selv før vi fik Maskine til det, vi syntes ikke det skade oss nævneverdi.

that season when we remind each other of the judicial murder of a Jewish revolutionary two thousand years ago by distributing chocolate eggs to the children of people we dislike.

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.

Religion is behavior and not mere belief.

We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent.