Quotes About Rituals

Before I drop in, I tend to knock on my snowboard. You know how when you jinx yourself, they're like, 'Knock on wood.' My snowboard's wood, so in case I jinxed myself sometime in the past, I just knock on my board. It just makes me feel a lot more comfortable.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

So much music in Africa was created for specific moments, written for rituals or for a funeral or for challenges, thousands of years ago, and these rhythms are still used.

Throughout history, civilizations have built a common cause through coming-of-age rituals. But we don't do that anymore. Maybe we should think about that.

The funeral business is so manipulative emotionally. I would want to be thrown into the sea or burned - something that's not a big hassle.

Korean children get a lot of fuss made over them, I guess because life was tough in the old country, and it was a big deal if you survived. There's a big party thrown when you are 100 days old, followed by another when you make it to one whole year.

I actually got thrown into my Bar Mitzvah because my teacher, my Cantor, did not tell me that they would all say 'amen' at the end of each, for want of a better word, paragraph. And that threw me completely. I almost went into an Ella Fitzgerald sort of scat.

We rush through our days so quickly and have so many little rituals that we do, day in and day out, but then a moment like the last day of school comes along.

every church can treat each discipleship class and each worship service as an opportunity for continual rehearsal of what the words, stories, symbols, rituals, and experiences in the Christian community mean.

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

Church on time, makes me party.

Every time I fail to smoke a cigarette between innings, the opposition will score.

I awake. I don't mean to but clearly I have not appeased the Sleep Gods with enough offerings.

He was going on about baptism. A birth and a death and a marriage, he said. A touch of water and these children are given the whole of life.

A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.

The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says in effect, 'No, I don't go near her, you fool, she'll eat you alive.' At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, 'Yes, by all means, now and forever yes.

much more than by its army, its administration, its institutions, and its police, society is held together with spells.

Los domingos por la mañana examinaba mis amuletos, la caja con dólares de plata que había enterrado junto al arroyo, y la muñeca enterrada en el campo, y el libro clavado en un árbol del pinar; mientras todo permaneciera donde yo lo había dejado, nada podía sucedernos

Once, matches were made behind a child's back; you came home from shaking hands with your in-laws, you wished the bride or groom a mazel tov, and that was that.

The Brotherhood was effectively a religious community, and one of the idols they worshiped was Number.

Tinha caprichos, desobedecia simplesmente pelo prazer de não obedecer. Nas fotografias de família, eu mostro a língua, viro as costas e em torno de mim os outros riem. Essas pequenas vitórias animavam-se a não considerar insuperáveis as regras, os ritos, a rotina; constituem as raízes de certo otimismo que devia sobreviver a todos os processos de adestramento.

Superstitions add texture to life.

I carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden.

Go. Go to your beautiful dances, your beautiful ceremonies. And we will bury our dead.