Top 40 Cathedral Quotes

Beauty is not generic, bland, and clinical. It isn’t all things to all people. The Cathedral of Notre Dame in its endlessly intricate detail was beautiful. Modern office buildings are not.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

People said making clothes inside out was not proper. I disagreed, because clothes that are inside out are as beautiful as a cathedral.

I loved Forcalquier, with its narrow medieval streets. Its elegant 12th Century cathedral boasts a carillon that chimes every Sunday morning. I also found a junk shop from which I could have furnished our entire farm.

We are material creatures who spend much of our lives on material pursuits (even building a cathedral or writing a novel requires stone and mortar or paper and ink).

Maimed but still magnificent… Europe’s mightiest medieval cathedral.

We forget the importance of engineering, but it’s been used to design everything from St. Paul’s Cathedral to The Shard.

I’m never happy with what I’ve written. You imagine, before you start, there’s a cathedral, and the moment it starts on the page, it’s a garden shed. And then you just try to make it the best shed you can.

I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains – Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur’s Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father’s spiritual touchstone, his chapel and cathedral in the wild.

Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and woman how the human and the divine love could go hand in hand.

For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it’s all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that’s the definition of spectacle.

I’m not a religious person. But, when I look at a beautiful cathedral, what brings awe, what induces awe is the idea that architecture, you know, a beautiful cathedral, a beautiful building.

My ambition is to give Oakland’s cathedral a universal character independent of the Catholic Church.

How wonderful to know that Christianity is more than a padded pew or a dim cathedral, but that it is a real, living, daily experience which goes on from grace to grace.

But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.

I read the Scriptures at the American Cathedral on Christmas and Easter; that’s it. It’s a task I love.

It is an exceptional event to build a cathedral – it must withstand several lifetimes.

My faith grew strong, and I sent a letter (as I was ordered) to the Rev. Dignitary of the Cathedral of Exeter. I was assured, before I sent it, he would not answer it.

I once worked it out – after $12 million, all millionaires are the same. That’s because we’re all humans, confined to human scale. How many homes can you live in? How many meals can you eat? You can have a living room the size of a cathedral, but you won’t live in it. It’s too big.

Every sport needs its temple, its cathedral.

My own introduction to music came quite early. My father didn’t have much of an education, but he was keen for me to get some qualifications, and I ended up winning a choral scholarship to a cathedral school.

A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral.

I love Spanish cities, particularly Barcelona, Madrid and Palma, which has the most amazing cathedral that I once went to for a wedding.

I studied at Cathedral School, where a lot of kids go abroad after Class XII. But I was clear that I wanted to be an actress, and thus, even though I got 92% in my board exams, I applied only to Jai Hind College for Mass Communication and got in and completed my graduation.

Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.

I like the thought that what we are to do on this earth is embellish it for its greater beauty, so that oncoming generations can look back to the shapes we leave here and get the same thrill that I get in looking back at theirs – at the Parthenon, at Chartres Cathedral.

I think there’s definitely a potential there for a congregation to survive without the Crystal Cathedral. The congregation is the people. It’s not the building.

The Sabbath is a weekly cathedral raised up in my dining room, in my family, in my heart.

The Zocalo is a magnificent space, at least four times the size of Trafalagar Square, with the National Palace on one side, the huge cathedral on the other, and in one corner part of the old Aztec City so brutally destroyed by Hernan Cortez and the Conquistadores.

The challenge of a cathedral is very good for architectural inventiveness.

As a child, I was always intrigued by the question: what is it that distinguishes a city from a town? Is it size? Population? Location? When I asked grown-ups, the confident answer was that a city has to have a cathedral – which, to a child raised in a devout Catholic setting, made sense.

When I first came to Wakefield Cathedral, I thought, ‘How does man conceive to build something like this?’ It’s a building that has transcended time over the centuries, and you appreciate the magnitude of humankind’s power and vision. When you’re inside, you feel as though the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

I sang at the Inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral.

I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.

Architecture is undistinguished, sometimes derelict, but occasionally, as in ‘Post and Beam,’ there is something arresting in a setting… the building behind the Cathedral.

The presence of industrial quantities of Byzantine pottery dating from the sixth century AD on the headland at Tintagel, Chinese silk in the tombs around Mecca and ‘Arabic’ numerals in the 13th-century beams of Salisbury Cathedral tell us we have been interdependent not for decades but across millennia.

When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then – and not until then – will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth.

But I did get to see the Notre-Dame cathedral, which was really special to me. I’m completely heartbroken over the fire, but I’m really glad that they’re gonna be able to salvage it.

There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.