Quotes About Rituals

The eating of beef was reserved for specific occasions, such as rituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status. This is a common practice in other cattle-keeping cultures as well.

Superstitions are just coincidence or ignorance.

The other form of genuine connection is more general, and best explained by reversing the traditional metaphor of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. During the past fifty years, as described, a lot of babies have been removed from the bathwater of primeval seasonal festivity, in the shape of customs which proved to be a lot less old than had previously been supposed.

any formalized practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world'.

Irene nodded. She couldn't say it but she knew she was destroying a world. A little culture. It was the known and safe way of behaving in the family. All the rituals, wrong or sick, it didn't matter, good or bad, would be useless. All the strategies. They knew the familiar treacheries, but now they would be open to new dangers.

When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything... And all rites are of this kind.

I have a half an hour warm-up I do that my voice teacher gave me. I exercise at least for an hour during the day. I don't have any superstitious rituals or anything like that.

These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization.

he had no idea what to do about death. Two thousand years of flaming Viking boats and Celtic rites and Irish wakes and Puritan worship and Unitarian hymns, and still he was left with nothing.

The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained—as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of cross-pollination among them.

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.

Although she never went to the synagogue...Grandma [Lausch], all the same, burned a candle on the anniversary of Mr. Lausch's death, threw a lump of dough on the coals when she was baking, a kind of offering, had incantations over baby teeth and stunts against the evil eye. It was kitchen religion and had nothing to do with the G-d of the Creation who turned back the waters and exploded Gomorrah, but it was on the side of religion at that.

Surely the gestures of murmuring priests must contain some deep meaning

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

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

Even in a godless world, rituals are required.

his childhood Catholicism had never left him and he still derived comfort from a place of worship.

Habits are the shorthand of behavior.

Priests, altars, victims, swam before my sight.

There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.

Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death.

For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.

Where I come from, there were traditions with my race and whenever you faced a curve in life, there was always a tradition.

The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar represents one exception to the otherwise typical neglect of intoxication. Dunbar and his colleagues see the physiological effects of alcohol, in particular, as a crucial component in social rituals. Specifically, they point to the endorphin release triggered by booze, especially when drinking is combined with music, dance, and ritual, as a crucial factor allowing humans to cooperate on a scale unattainable by our monkey or ape relatives.