Quotes About Rituals

One of the main functions of formalized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.

Christianity . . . sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments.

It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested.

Sunday, if I'm lucky, I'll go to church or listen to some good spiritual advice on the television or on the radio. I take three or four baths to try to cleanse myself, so I'm fresh for Monday.

I really love the traditional aspects of Judaism. My wife is born and raised a Catholic and I enjoy celebrating those rituals as well. I am very spiritual but not in any way religious, no.

The slightest act of love holds greater spiritual power than a thousand rituals.

The opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics are mass satanic rituals disguised as a celebration of Britain and sport. Their medium is the language of symbolism.

I keep a lucky red rag in my pocket when I bat, which has been a good luck charm for a few years.

primitive religions are based entirely on fear

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals.

The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried.

The Quakers pray as the spirit moves them; but to let oneself be moved by the spirit is an arduous business. Kindlier and more worldly churches, with a feeling for human weakness, provide their worshipers with rituals, litanies, beads and prayer wheels.

on Candlemass Day, February 2nd, on Rood Mass Day, May 1st, on Lammas Day, August 1st, and on the eve of All Hallows, October 31st.

Drug-taking, it is significant, plays an important part in almost every primitive religion. The Persians and, before them, the Greeks and probably the ancient Hindus used alcohol to produce religious ecstasy; the Mexicans procured the beatific vision by eating a poisonous cactus; a toadstool filled the Shamans of Siberia with enthusiasm and endowed them with the gift of tongues.

When loneliness mastered him he would go up to the cemetery...The rest of his time was taken up with a liturgy of habits that succeeded in warding off sadness.

El resto de su tiempo lo consumía en una liturgia de costumbres que conseguía preservarle de la infelicidad.

El resto de su tiempo lo consumia en una liturgia de habitos que conseguian defenderlo de la infelicidad

We cannot look at history and expect our contemporary perceptions to apply. His-story is a male sport, the story of men, as told by men through the ages. Women figure in it simply to patch the silent phrases. But there is an uncanny resemblance between rituals of forgotten history and the reign of the feminine unconscious.

there is faith and faith. One form of faith is actual practice—the rituals and so on—the other form of faith involves actually believing in it.

For too many generations of the common people of Rome were allowed no hand in governing, and their state religion had long since mummified into dry rituals that never touched ordinary passions. It was inevitable, proclaimed the dour scholars of the philosophical schools, that the Colosseum would become their chief temple and the fortunes of gladiators would be watched more closely than the rise and fall of nations.

Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.

Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble." —Shakespeare (Macbeth)

Henry Van Til once noted that culture is religion externalized. Cultus (worship) lies at the heart of every culture. And the reason our culture has forgotten God is because our worship services did that first.