Quotes About Ritual

Just went to a lovely Catholic wedding. I need a drink. They didn't even offer us water. Well they did, but it was Holy water.

Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life.

A wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth.

Philosophy of course is the essence of every religion; mythology explains and illustrates it by means of the more or less legendary lives of great men, stories and fables of wonderful things, and so on; ritual gives to that philosophy a still more concrete form, so that every one may grasp it — ritual is in fact concretised philosophy.

What would the world do without tea? - how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.

It's the first time I've really enjoyed dancing. I sometimes even forget I belong to an inferior race. The Twist is the greatest ritual since circumcision—and there you can choose between the genius of two cultures. Myself I prefer the Twist."1

Any religion...is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.

Trzeba wstawa?. Trzeba podnie?? si? z ?ó?ka i wykona? pi?tna?cie czynno?ci, nad których sensem nie wolno si? zastanawia?. Naro?l automatycznych przyzwyczaje?. B?ogos?awiony rak bezmy?lnego ?adu tradycji.

I needed to go into that bare, with nothing from my own life on my body, the way woodcutters' children in fairy tales have to leave their protections behind to enter the enchanted castle; the way votaries in old religions used to go naked to their initiation rites.

The true shaman, the true naturalist, works to reconnect conscious human life with Nature and Spirit through totems and ritual.

At noon of the first day of every year, it is traditional for the crier to recite a passage of verse, an ode composed long ago for this annual celebration, which takes exactly one hour to deliver

I have the same wind-down routine when I go to bed, whether I'm shooting or not. It's nothing too special - maybe some TV, maybe a book.

For the first three years of his life, my son insisted on hearing 'Goodnight Moon' before bedtime. Like most babies, he was not a good sleeper by disposition - but reading seemed to help, and this book specifically became part of his whole wind-down ritual.

I end every speech the night before a game with, 'Now, let's go get a snack.'

Before every show, we get into a circle, hold hands, and someone makes a speech. Most bands are too cool for that.

Every couple of seconds out here they're honoring somebody. You've got to get dressed, go in and sit down. Invariably somebody makes a speech.

I had one of those farcical bar mitzvahs where they spell out the words phonetically on index cards, and you don't even know what you're saying.

In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.

I always write 'Magic Potion' on my perfume bottles so when I use them, it feels magical - I make spells in the morning when I put them on.

I love Hanukkah because it's so weird. You just sit there and light candles and say spells.

In my midteens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism, but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual.

You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality.

I'm a big believer in the way ritual can put us in connection with our spirituality.

Shaving my head was a millennium ritual, to not let it pass as just another New Year's Eve. A lot has happened to me in the last couple of years, personally and spiritually. I wanted to mark it for myself.