Quotes About Cathedrals

Hospitals were for me quite suddenly no longer places of dread to be avoided but secular cathedrals of the humanist spirit, worthy of celebration.

Our horizon is the creation of a noble society to which, like the medieval builder of those glorious cathedrals, you will have added your conception, your artful piece of stone.

There are only two or three places in Britain with Catholic and Protestant cathedrals,and Liverpool is one. My wife Montse and I like to go to both of them.

The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals.

My duties led me into the darkest cellars as well as the most beautiful cathedrals; often I found the cellar illuminated with a holy light, and the cathedral dark.

I have had a good many more uplifting thoughts, creative and expansive visions—while soaking in comfortable baths or drying myself after bracing showers—in well-equipped American bathrooms than I have ever had in any cathedral.

Holding ten cathedrals at arm's-length must have been terribly tiring.

A poet once wrote that cathedrals were never built beside the sea because it was so beautiful it would distract the people from praying.

En ese instante retrocedían a un lugar sin lugar, sin espacio, sin luz. Solo le quedaba el recuerdo del peso de las catedrales sobre sus cuerpos sin cuerpo. Perdió su otra memoria y perdió también el privilegio de la luz asombrosa. —

But Paris, Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets—as vast and indestructible as nature itself.

The secret of great cathedrals is that their proportions conform to cosmic laws, 'shaping' people who spend time in them.

As serfs, these people built cathedrals; emancipated, they build only horrors.

When modes of expression are worn out, art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incomprehensible universe. An intelligible shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly. A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia.

A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia.

In the quiet back streets of Lérida and Barbastro I seemed to catch a momentary glimpse, a sort of far-off rumour of the Spain that dwells in everyone's imagination. White sierras, goatherds, dungeons of the Inquisition, Moorish palaces, black winding trains of mules, grey olive trees and groves of lemons, girls in black mantillas, the wines of Málaga and Alicante, cathedrals, cardinals, bull-fights, gypsies, serenades—in short, Spain.

Management theorists have sanctified capitalism in much the same way that clergymen of yore sanctified feudalism. Business schools are cathedrals of capitalism. Consultants are its traveling friars. Just as the clergy in the days of feudalism spoke in Latin to give their words an air of authority, the myrmidons of capitalism speak in a similarly indecipherable mumbo-jumbo.

It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.

What was the vision for our team? What big goals would we sign up for? I wanted to decide this in Athens, as a team with Matt in person. I wanted us to make big bets and show the company we could have visions of cathedrals and build them with bazaar methods. What I didn't want was to spend days riffing on yet more ideas, only to return home was as much ambiguity as when we'd arrived. The bottleneck is never code or creativity; it's lack of clarity.

Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring." (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)

Monastic schools located in the countryside provided most of the education in Europe. With the urban boom of the eleventh century and the growing strictness of the monasteries brought about by church reform, cathedrals once again began opening schools (or, in a few cases, expanding existing schools) in the cities.

As Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche puts it, you can tell what the most important building is within a society by which is the tallest. Within ancient Europe, cathedrals often reached the most soaring heights, as did mosques in the ancient Middle East. Now, in our Western metropolises, we all bow before cathedrals of financial commerce. Our sacred values are implied by our ritualistic choices, whether we agree to them or not. We

Not even the most secular among us can fail to be uplifted by Christianity's architectural legacy - the great cathedrals. These immense and glorious buildings were erected in an era of constricted horizons, both in time and in space.

As regards my own 'philosophy,' I continue to be inspired by the music, liturgy and architectural tradition of the Anglican Church in which I was brought up. No one can fail to be uplifted by great cathedrals - such as that at Ely, near my home in Cambridge.

Whenever I traveled abroad and went into these old cathedrals and churches, I would feel so peaceful.