Top 90 Ritual Quotes

In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that is, the sacred lore of priests and people… and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual.

Growing up, I came to love Egypt and respect Islam, but I never thought to go beyond the surface. Back in Canada, many of my father’s Egyptian friends questioned his decision not to raise his only child more strictly in the faith. I was not taught salat, the Muslim ritual of prayer, nor did I study Arabic.

Before I play a show, I put on lavender oil – it’s sort of a ritual.

It’s no accident that most self-help groups use ‘anonymous’ in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one.

With ritual, I punctuate my days till they no longer belong to who I am today but to who I’ll be when I look back in days and years to come.

There is a close meshing with the ritual properties of persons and with the egocentric forms of territoriality.

I find the ritual of shaving very relaxing, but for every day, it’s pretty irritating on my skin, so I like having the definition a beard gives.

In my midteens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism, but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual.

The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.

I basically try to visualize the team doing good things on the court the night before the game. I get shots up. There’s not actually a pregame ritual that I do. I’m still trying to figure that out. I say a prayer. I go out with confidence.

I do love the idea of ritual. I’m a very ritualistic person. I have to wash my face twice, and on the second wash before I rinse, I brush my teeth, then I rinse, then I floss, then I put on moisturizer. I’m ritualistic. Jewishness is very ritualistic.

In Judaism, almost every ritual entails either food or the absence of food. Yom Kippur, for instance, is the absence of food. Part of it is Talmudic, part of it is custom. So much of Judaism was bound up in dietary laws. So everything you ate – the very act itself – was part of religion.

The thing most consistently on my desk as I write is a cat – a different one at different times of the day. I think I’m more a part of their ritual.

My earliest memory was watching my mother do her makeup. She was obsessed with beauty and collected makeup and experimented with it. I think it’s a lot of young men and women’s experiences, growing up: watching the ritual of what their mothers would do.

Religion and ritual can be vehicles for entering stillness. It says in Psalm 46:10, ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’ But they are still just vehicles. The Buddha called his teaching a raft: You don’t need to carry it around with you after you’ve crossed the river.

The ritual of families watching TV together passed into antiquity around the time I was my son’s age; that was when households tended to have a single television and when the choices of what to watch were manageable.

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.

I was broke when I lived in New York City during college, so I’d spend weekends walking around town, grabbing something to eat, and interacting with strangers. That ritual has stuck with me.

I was this Catholic kid, and I never really lost that. I loved the rituals of Catholicism. The mass is a magic ritual; it’s a transubstantiation, and the stations of the cross – I mean, a crown of thorns? Getting whipped? It’s punk rock.

In a way, I feel it might be ill-mannered to try and top myself. The music I play is a ritual. Something that matters to people in a special way. I wouldn’t want to interfere with that.

I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish – a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.

I had a longing for ritual, something I could cling to, a routine to make me feel well and contented. I hoped that reading Bible commentaries and theological critiques would nudge me closer to some kind of absolute that I could hold up as a torch to light my way.

Shaving my head was a millennium ritual, to not let it pass as just another New Year’s Eve. A lot has happened to me in the last couple of years, personally and spiritually. I wanted to mark it for myself.

I have a very wonderful bath ritual.

Meals and eating and that sort of ritual of gathering at a table is such a part of childhood, and that was such a strange moment. It made me nervous to watch my mom cook for us and then not engage in the act of eating with us.

It’s part of my ritual to watch a new film every day, no matter what. It’s important to me.

Banks now want you to pay for face time, as more institutions charge fees for what was once the ritual for withdrawing and depositing your money: interacting with a teller.

Every two months, I’ll get a trim, and every two years, I’ll get a cut. And my night ritual is that I go to sleep. I don’t wrap my hair, I don’t bun my hair, I don’t do crap!

If the music in a groove fits with what you’re playing, then play it; if not, then you can play it backwards. If that doesn’t work, you try it at a different speed. If it really doesn’t work you just break it. The whole ritual to put a record on a turntable just to listen to it, I don’t do that too often.

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

I enjoy ritual and ceremony. What I don’t like is when it’s badly done or sloppily done. This is actually a theological issue – the forms we adopt, the actions we take, the way we do things, are, as it were, a sacrament.

I write in a journal daily. This extraordinary ritual has revolutionised my mindset, transformed my heartset, and generally influenced my life exponentially.

I’m really blessed. I love my job. Love going to work. I just love it. I love getting it, I love preparing for it. I love the whole process. I love the whole ritual. I’m really very lucky. Lucky girl.

I was brought up a strict Christian. My father was a lay preacher, my mother a church warden. The rhythm and ritual of the Anglican Church was part of our lives.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

A cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens.

You need to have spent your time from playing Top 40 pop rock in order to know how to play a song like ‘Ritual,’ a song like ‘Absolution’ or ‘Idolatrine.’ You need to know your classic drumming and your classic guitar.

Mobile is a seaport town, and we ate a lot of seafood. We’d go fishing, we’d catch our fish and we’d eat our fish. It was a ritual on Saturday morning for all my family – my grandfather, my brothers, my uncles, my father – to go fishing, and then the ladies of the family would clean the fish and fry them up.

Breastfeeding is this savage ritual that just reminds you that your body is a cafeteria now.

The key to forming good habits is to make them part of your ‘rituals.’ I have a morning ritual, afternoon ritual, and Sunday ritual. It’s one way to bundle good habits into regular times that you set aside to prepare yourself for the life you want. Rituals help you form habits.

For faithful Catholics, communion is not just a nice ritual: It is the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and the ultimate sign of our willingness to be incorporated into the church.

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.

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.

The time I spend in the morning – praying, sipping coffee, and coming up with my list – is a ritual I relish. I have done it for so long now that I subconsciously measure whether or not the things I’m doing match with what I should be doing, what I want to be doing, and the life I want to live.

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.