Quotes About Ritual

First we eat, then we do everything else.

We stand in black to watch this rite performed, the body in the box, the box in the hole, the dirt on the box.

In my experience, there's not much that can't be fixed by a decent cup of tea.

I heard the priest murmur the familiar recitation about dust and ashes and my eyes filled with tears. I wiped them away with a handkerchief.

Nathan poured himself a black coffee and replaced the jug in the

My aunt Lina will be waiting there with her apron open, ready to catch the head. She makes the best souse—that's from the tongue, ears and feet—this side of the Cumberland Gap. But my favorite part of the whole day, since I was small, is when Daddy tips all the innards into a tub and we get to choose the best bit to roast.

my dad seems to think that's not the greatest reference. But in my experience there's not much that can't be fixed by a decent cup of tea…

George was inspired. He had an idea, walked into his children's bedrooms and asked each one to tell him their success of the day. He explained that it could be something great that had happened to them that day or something they were proud of. The children lit up and smiled as they recalled their successes and George knew this would be their new nightly ritual.

Varje natt på Klara Norra tillbads han och offrades, hans kropp styckades och åts, och nästa morgon återföddes han hel och levde igen.

los grupos crean seres sobrenaturales no para explicar el universo, sino para poner orden en sus sociedades.

European travelers to every continent witnessed people coming together to dance with wild abandon around a fire, synchronized to the beat of drums, often to the point of exhaustion. In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich describes how European explorers reacted to these dances: with disgust.

To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.

If we had no sense of disgust, I believe we would also have no sense of the sacred.

A college football game is a superb analogy for religion.

Fear of defending the accused: When a public accusation is made, many friends and bystanders know that the victim is innocent, but they are afraid to say anything. Anyone who comes to the defense of the accused is obstructing the enactment of a collective ritual. Siding with the accused is truly an offense against the group, and it will be treated as such. If passions and fears are intense enough, people will even testify against their friends and family members.

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.1

I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy.

ritual heightens grief, makes it momentous, enforces concentration on its object who is yet gone for so short a time that it is unimaginable that he will not come back – the conviction of death's certainty is founded on prolonged exposure to absence rather than on the presence of the meat in the coffin or on bearing witness to the agent (physical or chemical, alien or quisling, sudden or chronic) of that immeasurable change.

You know what I like to do on a Sunday morning? Clean my house. I really enjoy it it's my ritual. I require tidiness, actually. I have to have everything spotless before I can relax.

The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.

The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better.

Making tea is a ritual that stops the world from falling in on you. Everything pauses while you do familiar things with taps and kettles; it allows you to catch your breath and become calm.

Making tea is a ritual that stops the world from falling in on you.

We read off the ancient Hebrew words, with no idea of what they might mean, and the congregation responds with more words that they don't understand either. We are gathered together on a Saturday morning to speak gibberish to each other, and you would think, in these godless times, that the experience would be empty, but somehow it isn't.