Quotes About Ritual

Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

THE WILD ROSE” – BY WENDELL BERRY Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart. Suddenly you flare again in my sight A wild rose at the edge of the thicket where yesterday there was only shade And I am blessed and choose again, That which I chose before.

Ritual and myth are like seed crystals of new patterns that can eventually reshape culture around them.

Know that the eradication of the identification with the body is charity, spiritual austerity and ritual sacrifice; it is virtue, divine union and devotion; it is heaven, wealth, peace and truth; it is grace; it is the state of divine silence; it is the deathless death; it is jnana, renunciation, final liberation and bliss.

I have a very difficult time believing that there is some being who is going to invite me into heaven or not on the basis of whether I wear a yarmulke or whether I have been sprinkled with water while someone said something. Some of the ritual is very beautiful, but I find it difficult to believe that it really has to do with God. I believe that dogma comes from man.

Coastal sailing as long as it is perfectly safe and easy commands no magic. Overseas expeditions are invariably bound up with ceremonies and ritual. Man resorts to magic only where chance and circumstances are not fully controlled by knowledge.

Every time I dance I have a high. I mean every time I danced, it was the whole world was the stage and I was in control of it and there was a form and a ritual and yet it was spontaneous and life didn't matter after that of before

I really love doing yoga. My main ritual is yoga. I do A LOT of yoga

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

Hypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology; it is not false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest.

The skaters a lot of times do their own hair and makeup before they compete. That was always kind of a ritual...that calming, quiet time where you can just do your hair and makeup. And then I would always lace up my right skate before my left one.

Those of us who preach religion: Preach the meaning of "ritual," and stop burying the people and enslaving the people by religious rituals, and then showing them a hypocritical example in leadership!

There are for starters, grandeur and silence, pure water and clean air. There is also the gift of distance ... the chance to stand away from relationships and daily ritual ... and the gift of energy. Wilderness infuses us with its own special brand of energy.

Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences.

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!

I'm not sure how each one of us sees ourselves in the band, but we're being part of this ritual of identity where people see Café Tacvba as something Mexican, as a representation of the Mexican. The songs, the music, the energy given in a concert. Sometimes I question that there's not much decision from our part, like there's something that leads us to this. Something beyond.

Today's Gypsies, who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads' fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of roughhewn wood like a child's laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer's eye and soul.

Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.

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.

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.

Therefore, a person should first be changed by a teacher's instructions, and guided by principles of ritual. Only then can he observe the rules of courtesy and humility, obey the conventions and rules of society, and achieve order.

Man cannot be enlightened through any organization, creed, dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through understanding the contents of his own mind, through observation, not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.

I loved the atmosphere of the dance studios - the wooden floors, the big mirrors, everyone dressed in pink or black tights, the musicians accompanying us - and the feeling of ritual the classes had.

"Religions" of the Roman world varied. Most of it was ritual practices. There were periodic occasions when cities honored their guardian deities with sacrifices and ceremonies, to ensure that they stayed happy and kept the city safe.

The people are drugged with religion; and that's why the elites - who understand that it is just a ritual, and understand the truth of it but won't teach the truth of it to awaken the masses of the people: so, the leaders live in luxury at the expense of the weak, at the expense of the poor.

We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent.

Ircumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society.

The ritual was very important to me: cleaning the pot, rolling the pot.

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.

When I go and work with people, I never say, 'Your dog is changed for the rest of its life.' It's like a diet. You've got to maintain a discipline and ritual in your life to keep a certain figure.

Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and - if it does not create it - maintains decency.

I would advise anyone who is at the start of a rest ritual like the Sabbath, to take it slowly and grow incrementally into it. Recognize that it will be hard at first. It's a discipline but then it is a true and deep joy.

Truth without enthusiasm, morality without emotion, ritual without soul, are things Christ unsparingly condemned. Destitute of fire, they are nothing more than a godless philosophy, an ethical system, and a superstition.

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.

Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over all. Purgation was replaced by the purge.

For me, glamour was always an escape. When I was a kid, my mother was hospitalized, she was schizophrenic. When she was sick, she wouldn't do her hair or her makeup, and she just looked terrible. But when she got on medication and she was happy, she would go to the beauty parlor and wear makeup. So I really associate glamour with being happy. If you put on high heels and lipstick or get a new outfit, you feel great. It's a celebration of loving yourself, and the whole ritual of it is so great.

I've begun to recognize myself as a Catholic writer because my whole notion of the image, of symbol, of art and what it can do, has been conditioned by my immersion in Catholic culture, ritual, and art since my earliest days. Catholicism seeped into me through every pore. Catholicism is about seeping and pores!

One needs the invented, the spontaneous, the impromptu for ritual. Skepticism, that grain of salt, is inappropriate.

Every species has a dinner date as part of courting ritual. A woman who won't let you pay for dinner is rejecting your courtship. She may think she's playing fair, or that she's being a feminist, but a very deep level, she knows that she's crossing you off her list of possibilities.

The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us, to put it to work. The old ones inside us, the collective unconscious, the many lives, the divine eternal parts, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored.

The ritual of exorcism is not practiced by an ordinary priest. An exorcist requires specific training and must be thought to have a personal sanctity. He can be exposed to dangerous behavior and personal threat. His prayers often cause a violent response as he attempts to shine a beam of light into the darkness.

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.

I had this whole ritual with my mother making the bed with me inside it so I would be invisible.

What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. It's not a strictly spiritual affair; it has psychological roles to fulfill. You might not want it to be a religion based on your own experience but that's like wanting to clean up your dreams

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.