Quotes About Rituals

I still like to keep tapes of the few minutes before the final take, things that happen before the session. Maybe it's superstitious, but I believe if I had done things differently - if I had walked around the studio or gone out - it wouldn't have turned out that way.

I have OCD and, literally, walking on the left, needing things to be in even numbers with few exceptions. One and seven, any number that ends in seven, that's all me. All the tics like the pulling of the ear and scratching of the palms, all me.

Okay, I'm going to let you in on a little secret: I'm a very superstitious person. I'm walking onto the plane as we speak. I'm putting my hands on the outside of the plane and my feet are on the lip of the plane. I have to do it every time before I fly.

Every writer has their rituals. For me, it's morning walks along the beach. And then, in my study I have a huge painting of the Black Madonna hung over my desk, and quite a few pictures of Mary around me for inspiration.

If you look in the Bible there's no birthdays.

The Masonic aspect of Hollywood is so bizarre.

Kids need rituals. They need the security of them, the bonding time of them.

Rituals are the building blocks of life, my way of cobbling an entire summer together from incidental wisps.

I took a break after 'Confessions.' I was real picky. And then I suddenly realized I hadn't worked in a year. And I was sort of, like, not really happy. I think people are happier when they have structure, you know? You realize that as you get older. You have to have rituals and structure.

I was raised going to church every Sunday.

I was raised in a very religious household - it wasn't dogma, but we were raised Christian; we went to church every Sunday, Bible study, Bible camp every summer.

Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.

when you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk on the table: it attracts the dead. [sonnet 6]

there has been evident in our progressive world an increasing disregard and even disdain for those ritual forms that once brought forth, and up to now have sustained, this infinitely rich and fruitfully developing civilization. There is a ridiculous nature-boy sentimentalism that with increasing force is taking over. Its beginnings date back to the eighteenth century of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with its artificial back-to-nature movements and conceptions of the Noble Savage.

this grand and cacophonous chorus began when our primal ancestors told stories to themselves about the animals that they killed for food and about the supernatural world to which the animals seemed to go when they died.

Any method or process that alleviates human misery, pain, and distress is good. Many churches practice the laying on of hands; others make novenas and visit shrines; all are benefitted according to their mental acceptance or belief.

The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth's peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and story. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from and who we are becoming.

Yet the great "Why?" always at the center of the little "whats" and "hows" that makes religions into mythologies is often stronger in dead temples than in living.

Women's loyalty has to be earned with trust and affection, rather than barbaric rituals. The time has come to leave the old ways of suffering behind

is going to be more like a family and less like a business, more a growing network of friends than a set of rules and rituals.

New Orleans, more than many places I know, actually tangibly lives its culture. It's not just a residual of life it's a part of life. Music is at every major milestone of our life: birth, marriage, death. It's our culture.

We need new rituals to awaken us to the fact that we are not separate from the land, water, and sky. We need ceremonies putting us back in touch, and urging us to conserve the resources that give life to everything in existence. We need to once again think as part of something greater, to view reality from a place higher than the narrow confines of a shortsighted ego. Empathy toward other living things should be one of the very first lessons instilled by all religions.

We went to church every Sunday. When I was a kid, the only time I sang was around my family.

The shrine before her gave her a way to concentrate her thoughts, and powerful as symbols were, it was still just a symbol. Monuments and rituals served their purpose, but they fell away to insignificance before the essence of faith itself. That was what she offered the God-Emperor now.