RITUAL QUOTES II

quotations about ritual

Ritual quote

The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in those days, it worked. As time went on, and it started being used for spectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power, it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves, and machinery have been more or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through the grim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, though latent, needing only to touch the right sensitive head to reassert itself.

THOMAS PYNCHON

Gravity's Rainbow


So, apart from casting runes, what other hobbies do you have? Forbidden rituals, human sacrifices, torturing?

SIMONA PANOVA

Nightmarish Sacrifice


If you create a ritual and it doesn't work, change them. Don't let a poorly performing ritual become another bad habit.

AUSTIN CARR

"Three Rules For Creating Workplace Rituals To Improve Company Culture", Fast Company, October 27, 2017


We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it is good -- and that is the real theater -- to transcend them in the manner of play, by means of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "in play," show up, transform and reverse the systems which quietly order us about.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

Partisan Review, Volume 38, 1971

Tags: Michel Foucault


Rituals are missing nowadays.

RUSSELL BRAND

Revolution


Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man.

DON DELILLO

White Noise

Tags: Don DeLillo


Some rituals are very good coping with losses and coping with unexpected events. But if we do it at a performance way, then it may just be the way of setting it aside and carrying on with our own narrow lives, with our own sort of personal concerns about our own well-being.

JOHN PETERSON

"Psychologists speak on how people respond differently to tragedy after mass shootings", WSBT, November 6, 2017


They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd.

ANGELA CARTER

Burning Your Boats

Tags: Angela Carter


All men promiscuously do homage to God, but very few truly reverence him. On all hands there is abundance of ostentatious ceremonies, but sincerity of heart is rare.

JOHN CALVIN

Institutes of the Christian Religion

Tags: John Calvin


Behind the ritual, behind the ritual
You find the spiritual, you find the spiritual
Behind the ritual in the days gone by

VAN MORRISON

"Behind the Ritual"


A ritual becomes the match that lights the kindred celebration candle of sacred moments long ago ... tantalizing these entombed spirits to surface again.

WES ADAMSON

attributed, From Mormon to Mystic: Journey Through Religious Ideology into Awakened Liberation


Rise up and celebrate your life
We're not alone in our ritual
Sing for what you feel inside

BLACK VEIL BRIDES

"Ritual"


I do not want to credit my life to spells and rituals, cushioning me from the consequences of living.

THOMM QUACKENBUSH

Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft


Religion is more than rite and ritual.

YANN MARTEL

Life of Pi


This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.

ELIZABETH GILBERT

Eat, Pray, Love


In those rituals which are ministries of grace no man must interpose anything that can alter any part of the institution, or make a change or variety in that which is of divine appointment.

JEREMY TAYLOR

attributed, Day's Collacon

Tags: Jeremy Taylor


Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circumstances.

SUSAN CAIN

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking


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.

FRANK HERBERT

Dune Messiah

Tags: Frank Herbert


In addition to facilitating a sense of security and predictability, a childhood history steeped in family rituals also provides a robust template of belonging and meaning to take into our adult years. Who doesn't want that for the next generation?

SABINA READ

"Swap routines for simple rituals to help build cherished family memories", Herald Sun, October 13, 2017


Ritual submission
It happens everyday
Welcome pain
In a
Different
Kind of way

NASTY SAVAGE

"Ritual Submission"