Quotes About Rituals

Yeah I am superstitious. I use certain divot tools or ball markers and will change from time to time depending on how I'm playing.

Liberation is an ever shifting horizon, a total ideology that can never fulfill its promises. It has the therapeutic quality of providing emotionally charged rituals of solidarity in hatred - it is the amphetamine of its believers.

The art of exorcising machines has been lost for so long that we have not a single book of prayers and ceremonies concerning it.

To wash one's hair, make one's toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure.

The most momentous events in life—baptisms, weddings, and funerals—don't seem to take much time, but the effects of them bind up the whole of your existence.

Food to a large extent is what holds a society together, and eating is closely linked to deep spiritual experiences.

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them.

She holds every dress briefly by its shoulders like it's a schoolkid she's checking out for smudges before church. Then one by one they get flung away from her and into the fire.

I'd called [Stanley Garn] because he wrote an American Anthropolgist 's paper on the topic of human flesh and its nutritional value. Your cows, he said, are much more efficient. But I am not so much interested in cultures eating the flesh of their captive enemies as I am in cultures eating their own dead, the practical Why not? model of cannibalism, eating the meat of fresh corpses because it's there and it's a nice change from taro root.

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

a dream half-waking, broken and uneasy, of the small gods of small places; gods of hills and woods and streams and crossways; the gods who still haunt their broken shrines, waiting in the dusk beyond the lights of the busy Christian churches, and the dogged rituals of the greater gods of Rome.

I know a true believer when I see one--that high fervor, that total conviction, the calm that explodes into emotion in a moment. I was in a car full of conviction, full of ancient Greek rituals and destroying death. And murderers.

How little they knew what awaited them. They would soon find out that the caliphate ruled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi troubled itself little with the Prophet's law. That his men used the ancient punishments meant to instill an otherworldly fear—the chopping off of hands, of heads—as bloody, nihilistic gang rituals. The girls seemed to imagine they were en route to some Romeo and Juliet scenario in the desert. How could they not know?

In communities in which spiritual life was permeated -as it invariably was- with supernatural beliefs, sacred cults and rituals, and the practice of magic, this was a potent force. All known hunter-gatherer societies -as with any other human society- exhibit the universal human quest for ordering and manipulating the cosmos.

rituals of diplomacy, but also rituals of tribute to an empire.

African American boys or white boys. They don't have rituals, road maps, and initiation rites into a clear sense of a male strength and energy that is positive as opposed to just dominating.

Love-charms were easily manufactured anyway: you just wrapped a piece of paper bearing the words "I love you" around ten or twelve gold pieces, and there you were. In an emergency you could dispense with the paper.

We're genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we've collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses through civil codes, religious rituals, maternal warnings—the whole bag of tricks we call culture.

But, like all indulgences that are valued not just for their product but for their process, the sento will never entirely disappear. For in the unhurried rituals of scrubbing and soaking, and in the perspective of profound relaxation that can only be derived from immersion in water the meek might describe as scalding, there are qualities of devotion, and celebration, and meditation, qualities that are necessary concomitants to a life worth living.

Religion was all about the proper practices:

Judaism was not principally about belief per se; for most Jews, Judaism was a set of practices

The world's religious rivals are clearly related, but they are more like second cousins than identical twins. They do not teach the same doctrines. They do not perform the same rituals. And they do not share the same goals.

To keep people dependent on the church for their entire lifetime, create more sacraments.

By 1860, two out of three New York homes had daily deliveries of ice. One contemporary account describes how tightly bound ice had become to the rituals of daily life: