Litanies Quotes & Sayings

We need to create a new revolution, and to do that, don't waste your life: stop pleasing people, and become who you always wanted to be. — Paulo Coelho

Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. — Paul Hawken

No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No — Emily St. John Mandel

Litanies of the Rose
Rose with dark eyes,
mirror of your nothingness,
rose with dark eyes,
make us believe in the mystery,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.
Rose the colour of pure gold,
oh safe deposit of the ideal,
rose the colour of pure gold,
give us the key of your womb,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.
Rose the colour of silver,
censer of our dreams,
rose the colour of silver,
take our heart and turn it into smoke,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence. — Remy De Gourmont

The Quakers pray as the spirit moves them; but to let oneself be moved by the spirit is an arduous business. Kindlier and more worldly churches, with a feeling for human weakness, provide their worshipers with rituals, litanies, beads and prayer wheels. — Aldous Huxley

It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody goodness won't chime. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself. — Margaret Atwood

The thing that surprised me and really puzzled me is that the job is really fun. Yahoo is a really fun place to work. — Marissa Mayer

If you can't be an athlete, be an athletic supporter! — Eve Arden

I'm happy that the sacrificing, the hard training, the travel, the time being away from the family, is going to stop. So I'm happy; I'm glad about that. But I'm also terrified. Frightened. Because, I mean, in my whole adult life, cycling was the most consistent thing I ever did. — Jens Voigt

The next moment I was chained to my chair again,
the fires were lit, the bells rang out, the litanies were sung;
my feet were scorched to a cinder,
my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh consumed like shrinking leather,
the bones of my legs hung two black withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze;
it ascended, caught my hair,
I was crowned with fire,
my head was a ball of molten metal, my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets;
I opened my mouth, it drank fire,
I closed it, the fire was within, ... and we burned, and burned! I was a cinder body and soul in my dream. — Charles Robert Maturin

PRAISE FOR 'THE JOURNEY HOME'
Many saints are known and praised by all. We pray to them in litanies and celebrate their feast days. But the vast majority of holy men and women live heroic lives quietly before God.
Loyal to family, lovers of God, servants in the Church, these unsung saints live everyday life as an example for us. David Hanneman is one such man. His story is exemplary and should be told to the world. He not only lived a noble life, but also suffered with heroism and grace as he passed into glory.
This is a story to encourage and bless us all. We are thankful to Joseph Hanneman for sharing his father and making his story known to us who need such examples to encourage us as we face the difficulties and challenges of life. — Stephen K. Ray

Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system is known as resource accounting. — James Buchan

I never would've imagined in the first part of my life that I could've stood up and said anything. The war in Vietnam changed me. I was so angry. Some of my speeches probably weren't well considered. — Jane Fonda

Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can't help at all.
It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love. — Richard Brautigan

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return form the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth. Ailinon, alleluia! — Annie Dillard

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms! — Erica Jong

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling "traditions"; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as "identities" that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation. — Susan Sontag

They cut the menu from twenty-five items to nine, featuring hamburgers and cheeseburgers, and they made the burgers a little smaller - ten hamburgers from one pound of meat instead of eight. — David Halberstam

It was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words ofthe Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture. — Mary McCarthy

He knew now what this thing was - hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life. And how dead the world is ... a world of doorknobs. He wondered if hysteria were really too steep a price to pay for bringing it to life. — Nathanael West

The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorized new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn't speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic. — Simone De Beauvoir

A life of prayer is a life whose litanies are ever fresh acts of self-devoting love. — Frederick William Robertson

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars. — Anonymous

Neglect not your time, nor use it haphazardly; on the contrary you should bring yourself to account. Structure your litanies and other practices during each day and night. This is how to bring about the spiritual blessing (baraka) in each period. If each of your breaths is a priceless jewel, Be not like the deceived fools who are joyous because each day their wealth increases while their life grows ever shorter. — Al-Ghazali

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.
speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962 — John Steinbeck

It is one of the many graveyards which are the Great War's chief heritage. The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless plains of Picardy and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter. — John Keegan