Quotes About Ritual

The first thing I do is brush my teeth - we like to start the morning with fresh breath - and put on my pajamas and meander down to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice. No coffee. No caffeine.

I usually wake up around 9, and the first thing I do is make myself a cup of tea. I drink a lot of tea - green tea, white tea, and all kinds of herbal teas.

The first thing I pack for meets is my makeup bag!

The first thing I do after I wake up is switch on the music player and the last thing I do before going to sleep is stop it.

I wake up, and the first thing is to find a Starbucks so I can get a coffee. After that, I have a breakfast and head into the gym.

I wake up early in the morning and the first thing I have is almonds soaked overnight, with walnuts and raisins. Then I have one fruit - apple or pear.

The most important thing for me is to have my cereal. I have milk and granola and cheese. And that's it. I have a lot of cereals that I eat all day long, and I have a big appetite. All over the planet I carry my cereals!

When I work in the theater, you know you'll get this almost devotional, religious experience where you're breaking bread with everyone every day.

I have little routines in the theater. Once I've established something, like the order of putting on makeup and a costume, I have to invariably do it in the same order every time, even if I only did it by chance the first time round.

The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.

I arrive at the theatre four hours before the beginning of the performance. I must get accustomed to the hall even if I know it well.

When I was younger, I followed the example of an experiment, once performed by Krishnamurti and placed a rock that held no special significance on my mantel and bowed to it each day. I did this deliberately to see whether I could infuse a unique quality into something completely ordinary, simply by incorporating the rock within a morning ritual. At the end of a month, the rock held a special, holy place in my perception.

The late arrival of the horse in India is not surprising since the horse is not an animal indigenous to India. Even on the west Asian scene, its presence is not registered until the second millennium BC. The horse was unimportant, ritually and functionally, to the Indus civilization.

The worship of the Buddha by non-Buddhists remained largely formal and deferential.

For the next few centuries, brahmans who migrated from Kanauj to seek employment elsewhere were highly respected for their knowledge of ritual and their learning.

When I celebrated my bar mitzvah, there was no cake. Today, there is no such thing as a bar mitzvah in the United States without a special cake. It can be even more complicated and expensive than a wedding cake, because bar-mitzvah cakes are often based on a particular theme.

And extending a withered hand in the direction of the vote she slipped some salted almonds into her bosom.

This was our ritual. Our breaking break, our communion. and it all began with that trusting moment where my father walked up behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. By now they stood staring at each other helplessly over the broken dish.

He began his morning at six a.m. with a cup of coffee and a paperback.

Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

As he always did before retiring, so tonight he pulled out a drawer of his night table and took from it a small black ledger in which he wrote down the day's expenditures in a script so small that he could have written the Lord's Prayer on the heads of pins with it.

Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.

To become accepted by the bulk of humanity, spirituality must be "cleansed" of magic, thereby turning it into religion. The original ritualistic elements that are designed to liberate the individual from his cultural trance are labeled as "immoral" or "primitive.

The word is Latin, from monastic ritual dating back to the sixteenth century: adsum. I am here.