RITUAL QUOTES
quotations about ritual
Funerals are the rituals we create to help us face the reality of death, to give us a way of expressing our response to that reality with other persons, and to protect us from the full impact of the meaning of death for ourselves. Some funerals fulfill these functions beautifully. Others fail.
ALLA BOZARTH CAMPBELL
Life Is Goodbye, Life is Hello
People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human -- in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost. We kill to eat, we cut down trees to build our homes, we exploit other people and the earth. Sacrifice -- of nature, of the interests of others, even of our earlier selves -- appears to be an inescapable part of our condition, the unavoidable price of all our achievements. A successful ritual is one that addresses both aspects of our predicament, recalling us to the shamefulness of our deeds at the same time it celebrates what the poet Frederick Turner calls "the beauty we have paid for with our shame." Without the double awareness pricked by such rituals, people are liable to find themselves either plundering the earth without restraint or descending into self-loathing and misanthropy. Perhaps it's not surprising that most of us today bring one of those attitudes or the other to our conduct in nature.
MICHAEL POLLAN
A Place of My Own
Ritual is, therefore, a primary site of contact between self and society, a place where our individual selves are transformed into collective selves.
MARK PEDELTY
Musical Ritual in Mexico City: From the Aztec to NAFTA
In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Family and Other Essays
What art thou, thou idol ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry V
We not only nurture our sacred relationships through ritual, but we are nurtured by them as well. In ritual, we move, and we are moved.
ALISON LEIGH LILLY
"Turning the Soil of Soul: Ritual as Celebration", Patheos, February 11, 2016
Our comfort in theological traditions should never usurp our desire for spiritual Truth. If we vigorously pursue the rituals rather than a relational experience with God then we've missed His message entirely.
JASON VERSEY
A Walk with Prudence
You have to trust someone before you can have rituals with them.
RACHEL KLEIN
The Moth Diaries
A ritual is something every man do around his house or
Any time of the day, every man got his own ritual that he does
To keep himself alive
WITCHDOCTOR
"The Ritual"
Whatever their pitch, you
Can feel them bewitch you
The rich and the ritual knells
Of the bells of Notre Dame
ALAN MENKEN
"The Bells of Notre Dame"
Ceremonies cemented the impression that Humanity, not Chaos, reigned over the universe.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Atreides
Ritual is the passage way of the soul into the Infinite.
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
"Sand"
This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten.
CHRIS ABANI
Becoming Abigail
Ritual is to spiritual greatness what practice is to a tennis player, daily writing disciplines are to a novelist, and reading company accounts are to Warren Buffett. They are the precondition of high achievement.
JONATHAN SACKS
"Ritual and Routine Lead to Creative and Spiritual Heights", Algemeiner, February 17, 2016
Rituals are not fixed--they are constructed and reconstructed over time, to fit people's needs.
GLEB TSIPURSKY
"Celebrations, Rituals, and Constructing Meaning in Life", Patheos, November 8, 2017
Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.
TERRY PRATCHETT
Discworld: Pyramids
And in this lies the very grandeur of its worship, that in the "chartered freedom" of our Christian ritual, each nation and community, each separate society and church and individual, lifting up its own note of adoration, all are found to blend in the one accordant anthem, the one manifold yet harmonious tribute of the Universal Church's praise.
JOHN CAIRD
Sermons
Every progressive, inclusive thought is only as powerful as the ritual it permeates.
SWATI BHATTACHARYA
"TOI celebrates womanhood; #NoConditionsApply", Indian Television, November 8, 2017
Oh, it's a bad, bad ritual
Oh, but it calms me down
TIMBER TIMBRE
"Bad Ritual"
Only when we're lost can we find ourselves again
A ritual that can't be explained
MS MR
"Reckless"