Quotes About Ritual

The preparation for the ritual is the ritual.

I see God in a sunrise, not in repetitious ritual.

I wasn't losing my focus but I was getting tired of focusing. What I was focusing on was becoming too routine, too ritual, not something that was interesting, new and exciting.

Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another. Pbscene is not the picture of a naked woman who exposes her pubic hair but that of a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression; obscene is not the ritual of the Hippies but the declaration of a high dignitary of the Church that war is necessary for peace.

There are traditionalists, and there are people in the middle, which is where I am. I still get my newspaper delivered. I love the ritual of it. But I also jump into the cab when I leave home and I look at some BBC on my iPad.

The true shaman, the true naturalist, works to reconnect conscious human life with Nature and Spirit through totems and ritual.

The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.

I was deliciously happy filming True Blood. I even kept all the scripts in my office, which I never do with any script. Although I did shred them all in one go when the series finished; it seemed like a ritual, somehow.

To clink glasses of a freshly made, seasonal beer, preferably in a pub or garden, with friends and perhaps new acquaintances, is a ritual that makes every participant feel good. We may not rationalize this at the time, but it gives us a sense of place in our common community and our time in the tides of life on earth. This is a way to value beer and treat it with respect.

In meditation take care not to impose anything on the mind, or to tax it. When you meditate there should be no effort to control, and no attempt to be peaceful. Don't be overly solemn or feel that you are taking part in some special ritual; let go even of the idea that you are meditating. Let your body remain as it is, your breath as you find it, and remain in your natural condition of unchanging pure awareness.

I don't really have a ritual. On the car rides over to the racetrack, I just make sure that the right songs are on.

Every day my mother had tea. My dad has his ritual cigar. They had their evening cocktail. Those rituals were done nicely, with flair and feeling.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

The best trick I learned was when a priest came to me when I was an altar boy and said, "Always, when you make a mistake, pretend it's ritual." It's beautiful!

Many of the religious apologists out there are not stupid people, they are often brilliant. People working in the field of theology and philosophy smart people everywhere. What they are those religious apologists are smart poeple who can build these amazingly intricate rationalizations for whatever weird practice they favor. Whether it's ritual cannibalism, or praying to spirits, or treating women as chattel. And they always building this on terrible shaky foundation of false premises.

There are few pages of history which do not demonstrate that public prayer and ritual never inoculated people against mass-madness and cruelty. What is needed is emphasis on morality and manners.

You can use meditation, and prayer, and ritual to foster compassion, love, and inclusiveness, or you can use them to foster hatred, and exclusiveness, and anger. And it's really just a matter of what concepts, ideas you decide to focus on.

Parties are the nightly ritual of the sophisticated society.

My own skin-care ritual is quite simple and straightforward; I don't like a lot of fuss, surprisingly. My products are designed to make you look and feel better. I think there are a lot of men out there who want and need the same products.

I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I'm working in the morning, I don't allow myself a cup of tea until I've written two paragraphs. It's harsh.

Y'all drinking whiskey is probably a gregarious act. When you're not an alcoholic it's pretty fun to drink whiskey. But when you are it's a very solo ritual. It's not gregarious at all. But vice has always informed country music and all music.

My brother, this "religiosity" is not the standard by which true men of God are measured. In all the rituals that Islam has, deeply imbedded in those rituals are principles of truth. And sometimes we get lost in the religiosity; we get lost in the "symbol," but we miss the substance of the truth that is buried in the ritual!

People are losing jobs, people need to be entertained, and I want to make movies that parents and children can look forward to seeing, that can become a kind of family ritual.

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

....the ancient ritual of the earth; ploughing and planting, reaping and threshing. The fundamental business remains unaltered; it is only the methods and tools that science is changing.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

I don't know why, but Putin has made a ritual out of humiliating Medvedev. Sometimes I even feel sorry for the prime minister.

I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death, of their lovers, friends and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets.

...just a little touches her and there. He puts his hands on your arms or back, he stands close to you, getting you used to him... it's a mating ritual. Like March of the Penguins.

It is a paradox that far too few Americans participate in the wonderful ritual of democracy that we call Election Day.

I can't believe it's actually happening. This is independent adulthood, this is what it feels like. Shouldn't there be some sort of ritual? In certain remote African tribes there'd be some incredible four day rites of passage ceremony involving tattooing and potent hallucinogenic drugs extracted from tree-frogs, and village elders smearing my body with monkey blood, but here,rites of passage is all about three new pairs of pants and stuffing your duvet in a bin-liner.

When people lack teachers, their tendencies are not corrected; when they do not have ritual and moral principles, then their lawlessness is not controlled.

Alice doesn't seem to mind because she's laughing too, and biting her lip, all doe-eyed, and tossing her freshly washed hair, and Norton tosses his lovely, glossy hair back, and she tosses her hair in return, and he tosses his, and she tosses hers, and it;s like some mating ritual on a wildlife program.

Disco existed before we were all born and will exist afterwards. It is a ritual - it is a celebration - and it is the same kind of music that we call disco or rock'n'roll or a whole list of names that we can call it. Call it what you will, nothing will change the fact that certain kinds of music will make you want to celebrate or party.

Even the most understated ceremony involves a certain respect for ritual and pageantry. No one plays more of a significant role than the bride's attendants.

In the luxuriance of a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached millions for whom that distant place would henceforth be envisioned as a sun-graced land resplendent with the goodness of the fruitful earth.

Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.

When tea becomes ritual, it takes place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.

For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.

The Masonic movement... is the custodian of the law; it is the home of the Mysteries and the seat of initiation. It holds in its symbolism the ritual of Deity, and the way of salvation is pictorially preserved in its work. It is a far more occult organization than can be realised, and is intended to be the training school for the coming advanced occultists. In its ceremonials lie hid the wielding of the forces connected with the growth and life of the kingdoms of nature and the unfoldment of the divine aspects in man.

Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

Eventually, ritual was developed as a means of contacting and utilizing the energy within humans as well as in the nature world.

How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one's whole lifetime, even as one protests it - what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization.

Tea-making is a ritual that, like the drink itself, warms the heart somehow.