Quotes About Rituals

When we are caught in notions, rituals, and the outer forms of the practice, not only can we not receive and embody the spirit of our tradition, we become an obstacle for the true values of the tradition to be transmitted. We lose sight of the true needs and actual suffering of people, and the teaching and practice, which were intended to relieve suffering, now cause suffering. Narrow, fundamentalist, and dogmatic practices always alienate people, especially those who are suffering.

In Judaism, almost every ritual entails either food or the absence of food. Yom Kippur, for instance, is the absence of food. Part of it is Talmudic, part of it is custom. So much of Judaism was bound up in dietary laws. So everything you ate - the very act itself - was part of religion.

I don't have any particular thing I do ritualistically. I do the same thing every day. I get up. Drink a lot of water. Have a wheatgrass shot. Drink some green juice. Eat as healthy as I can.

Before shows, we rub elbows and growl. It started once when someone had a cold, and we didn't want to hug each other. So we started rubbing elbows. And we don't kiss. We just go, 'Grrrr!'

I knock on my board to unjinx myself.

There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

The hand of a man hanged on the gallows has healing powers. If it be stroked across a sore, tumour or goitre, the evil shall pass to the dead man and the sick will be cured. If a woman be barren she should go to a gibbet at night, climb up and reach through the bars and draw the corpse's hand across her womb three or seven times and her curse will leave her. Lincoln

Churches crack me up. They're like money, a conspiracy of faith. Like everyone agreed to believe that not only is there a God, but he comes down and checks on folks, so long as they hang in certain places, put up alters, burn lots of candles and incense, and perform sit-stand-kneel and other wacky rituals that'd make a coven of witches not look OCD.

Churches crack me up. They're like money, a conspiracy of faith. Like everyone agreed to believe that not only is there a God, but he comes down and checks on folks, so long as they hang in certain places, put up altars, burn lots of candles and incense, and perform sit-stand-kneel and other wacky rituals that'd make a coven of witches look not OCD.

Die Abergläubigsten sind ja stets die in religiösen Dingen Glaubenslosen.

The problem I have with all this religion stuff is that I can't relate to it. I think most people got into 'cos it gave them something to do on a Sunday, but since all the shops are now open it isn't required as much.

It occurred to her, suddenly, that the Chinese took poets as concubines. Their poets slept with warlords. They wrote with gold ink. They ate orchids and smoked opium. They were consecrated by nuance, by birds and silk and the ritual birthdays of gods and nothing changed for a thousand years. And afternoon was absinthe yellow and almond, burnt orange and chrysanthemum. And in the abstract sky, a litany of kites.

Rather than seeing a contest between druid and Christian, I see no difference between stone chapel and stone circle. One encloses and protects the spirit; the other exposes it and joins it with the elements. In both of these places, we conjure the powers that affect and transcend us. We remind ourselves, in both places, that we need oats and milk, but we also need what we cannot see or put in our food bowls.

or with the nails, in the manner of dogs or cats, and not with a napkin, but with a toothpick of mastic wood, or with a feather, or with small bones taken from the drumsticks of cocks or hens." —Erasmus, "On Good Manners for Boys

As to our baths, there is not much that we can say, for we only bathe twice a year, before Christmas and before Easter." —Ulrich, a monk of Cluny, ca. 1075

People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.

I close my eyes and listen vaguely in a half sleep as he does the things he does before he sleeps each night. Brushing and squirting and splashing. So many things. People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.

Imagine the power of reading a psalm at age eighty that you read daily in your thirties. Rituals can tie our years together with

Like all those in the service of the gods, the isib had an elongated skull, was shorn of all hair, and carried the tattoos and piercings of the deity on his body beneath his multicolored linen robes. He was not one of the eunuchs. He was being groomed by Lugalanu himself to become a sanga, the next highest level of priest, an administrator with an eye toward becoming an ensi, the high priest.

The artificial hills and plazas of even small centers were symbolic depictions of the sacred landscape of mountains, hills, trees, and lakes, material replicas of the Maya cosmos designed as the settings for elaborate public rituals that sanctified Maya life—and water management. Tikal, Belize's Caracol, and other centers were giant water catchments, their pyramids "water mountains.

Tanto la magia como la religión surgen y funcionan en momentos de carácter emotivo: las crisis de la vida, los fracasos en empresas importantes, la muerte y la iniciación en los misterios de la tribu, el amor infortunado o el odio insatisfecho. Tanto la magia como la religión presentan soluciones ante esas situaciones y atolladeros, ofreciendo no un modo empírico de salir con bien de los tales, sino los ritos y la fe en el dominio de lo sobrenatural.

Some places have religion. Here we have safety drills.

Marjorie, your lack of self-knowledge is fabulous. Being a Jew is your whole life. Good Lord, you don't eat bacon. I've seen you shove it off your plate as though it were a dead mouse." "Well, I can't help that, it's habit." Noel shook

food disciplines are part of every great religion. Psychologically they're almost inevitable, and extremely practical....Religious discipline is nothing but a permanent psychic shelter.