Quotes About Cathedrals

There was, indeed, no life. Stillness and silence ruled here. In fact Tiffany, who cared a lot about getting words right, would have said it was a hush, which is not the same as silence. A hush is what you get in cathedrals at midnight.

Like the Norse conquests, cathedrals too are a consequence of a global climatic phenomenon, an enduring legacy of the Medieval Warm Period.

When I was seven, I went on a school trip to Blankenberge on an overnight ferry and I remember watching the White Cliffs of Dover disappear into the distance. After that trip, our family always spent holidays in Britain and Ive been to nearly every cathedral in Britain.

Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.

Cathedrals, Luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

I feel comfortable singing in the great cathedrals of the world because I spent so much time as a child singing in church. And it isn't very different. Of course, nothing looks quite like Notre Dame de Paris.

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

So I'll take all your books. But the cathedrals I'll leave behind. Their stone is sad and male.

When the cathedrals were white, spirit was triumphant. But today the cathedrals of France are black and the spirit is bruised. The works of the new civilization are coming together in a symphonic crescendo. The guiding spirit is faltering. The young act, but they do not know. The old cling to their accumulated treasures, but are unable to accomplish anything further.

Moreover, liberals asserted, the church maintained unsanitary practices, such as interring the remains of pious elites in the walls and beneath the floors of cathedrals, and it was unalterably opposed to science, progress, and liberal political ideas, making free use of censorship and spiritual intimidation to uphold its dogmas

Nelle cattedrali è sempre notte.

I went into the little church, all golden in the autumn sunlight, to say a prayer. Since then, I have visited the most beautiful cathedrals in Europe but they cannot make me forget that simple little house of God.

Los telescopios, esas catedrales de los tiempos modernos que recogen la luz del cosmos, constituyen fantásticas máquinas para retroceder en el tiempo.

Collaboration is how most of our ancestors used to work and live, before machines came along and fragmented society. Time to plant the fields? Everybody pitched in and got it done. Harvesttime? The community raced to get the crops in before the rains came. Where were those crops stored? In barns built by teams of neighbors. In the cities, the same spirit applied. Anonymous craftsmen spent their lives building cathedrals that wouldn't be completed for generations.

In the frozen stone of the cathedrals of Europe there co-exist the Apostles, Christ and Mary, lambs, fish, gryphons, dragons, sea-serpents and the faces of men with leaves for hair. I approve of that liberality of mind.

The cathedrals were not financed by taxes, on the poor or on the rich. They were financed by gifts, from rich and poor alike. They were not built at the expense of the poor; they were built by the poor, by the peasants who worked on them, and by their gifts. And the cathedrals were also built for the poor, who usually love them more than the rich do. (The rich build banks; the poor build cathedrals. We build what we love.)

Religion and Myth. It is impossible to understand Art and the glory of its history without avowing religious spirituality and the mythical roots that lead us to the very reason of being of the artistic phenomenon. Without the one or the other there would be no Egyptian pyramids, nor those of ancient Mexico. Would the Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals have existed? Would the amazing marvels of the Renaissance and the Baroque have come about?

Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.

Cathedrals are to be adored until the day when, to preserve them, it would be necessary to deny the truths which they teach.

I entered the City of Books, dark jewels hoarded in temples and cathedrals. In this city I found buried candelabra and stories waiting to be read during nights of sea and moon. I loved the City of Books where lost gazelles wandered in search of signs.

Middle Ages

Western cathedrals and abbeys…through soaring Gothic architecture, [give] us at floor level a sense of belonging within (but unable at the moment to inhabit more than a little of) great spaces of light and beauty, into which, significantly, only our music can penetrate.

Religion did not arise out of the need to assure social solidarity, nor were cathedrals built to encourage tourism. Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes