Morning Ritual Quotes & Sayings

My morning ritual is to get up and feed the dogs, take my daughter to school, and come home. — Richard Dean Anderson

A powerful exercise for building your appreciation muscle is to take 7 minutes every morning to write down all the things you appreciate in your life. I recommend this as a daily ritual for the rest of your life; however, if you think that is excessive, at least do it for 30 to 40 days. It will create a huge change in how you see the world. — Jack Canfield

You know what I like to do on a Sunday morning? Clean my house. I really enjoy it; it's my ritual. I require tidiness, actually. I have to have everything spotless before I can relax. — Jonathan Rhys Meyers

The Prodigal

Dark morning rain
Meant to fall
On a prison and a schoolyard,
Falling meanwhile
On my mother and her old dog.

How slow she shuffles now
In my father's Sunday shoes.
The dog by her side
Trembling with each step
As he tries to keep up.

I am on another corner waiting
With my head shaved.
My mind hops like a sparrow
In the rain.
I'm always watching and worrying about her.

Everything is a magic ritual,
A secret cinema,
The way she appears in a window hours later
To set the empty bowl
And spoon on the table,
And then exits
So that the day may pass,
And the night may fall
Into the empty bowl,
Empty room, empty house,
While the rain keeps
Knocking at the front door. — Charles Simic

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. — Kristin Armstrong

But, you know, they don't enjoy the dinner hour together. It's just not as much of a ritual at night and it's interesting. I think the ritual is taking place perhaps more in the morning. — Katie Couric

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark. — Olivia Sudjic

They dressed for dinner and followed the strict discipline of upper class English families. The next morning they took me with them for the county fox hunt. Since I could not ride, I asked to be excused. But I did get to see the ritual of dress, the hierarchy observed among hunting types, the blowing of horns, the handling of beagles, a poor fox being run to death and having its tail (brush) cut off. Having achieved their object, glasses of sherry were passed round like prasad after a religious service. — Khushwant Singh

If you have something to hide, I'm your worst nightmare. I'm a living, breathing, and walking lie detector. I can smell you down to the type of soap you use, your morning ritual, and the last time you took a hand and stroked your favorite body part. Everything leaves behind a scent ... Everything. — Ashley Jeffery

Honor Lost

Ambulant sunshine pierced
the soot covered glass ~
the feeble man wandered by
in this ritual morning pass ... — Muse

I had a very simple life growing up in the farm country outside of Perugia, and biscotti and warm milk with a tiny bit of coffee were a big part of my morning ritual before walking to school. — Brunello Cucinelli

We need to give children ways to help themselves feel good," she tells me. "Parents can start with simple messages throughout the morning that children can repeat - messages such as: It's so easy to get dressed. I love getting dressed. Breakfast is always a fun time. We're all so glad to see each other. We love eating breakfast together. Breakfast makes my body feel good. "Parents can even go around the table and have each family member share one thing they love about themselves. Or they can put affirmations in a bowl and choose one for the whole family to focus on during the day. This can become a morning ritual for couples, families, roommates, and so on. Each person can even decide on one experience they'd like to have that day and create an affirmation for — Louise L. Hay

I've been doing this new ritual where the first thing I do in the morning is put a tablespoon of coconut oil in my mouth and swish it around. Then I put Kora Organics Rosehip Oil all over my body, which is incredible for your skin, and have a freezing-cold shower, all while I'm swishing the coconut oil in my mouth. It's a way to get the circulation going and to make you feel reenergized and refreshed. — Miranda Kerr

I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I'm working in the morning, I don't allow myself a cup of tea until I've written two paragraphs. It's harsh. — Anthony Lane

If you exchanged wedding vows, tape them to your bathroom mirror and read them aloud to yourself every morning along with the ritual brushing of teeth. It's not realistic to believe that you will live your promises as a daily practice
unless you're a saint or a highly evolved Zen Buddhist. Not where marriage is concerned. But you can make a practice of returning to your vows when the going gets rough. — Harriet Lerner

So what part did I play in all this? Well, none really. They completely ignored me for the whole twenty or thirty minutes. Which was perfectly fine, of course, I didn't mind. But it did puzzle me, because early every morning they would come yelping and scratching around the doors and windows of my house until I got up and took them for their walk. If anything disturbed the daily ritual, like I had to drive into town, or have a meeting, or fly to England or something, they would get thoroughly miserable and simply not know what to do. Despite the fact that they would always completely ignore me whenever we went on our walks together, they couldn't just go and have a walk without me. This revealed a profoundly philosophical bent in these dogs that were not mine, because they had worked out that I had to be there in order for them to be able to ignore me properly. You can't ignore someone who isn't there, because that's not what "ignore" means. — Douglas Adams

The following morning, I swore to myself that I would not try to find out where Esther was living. For two years, I had unconsciously preferred to believe that she had been forced to leave, that she had been kidnapped or was being blackmailed by some terrorist group. Now that I knew she was alive and well (that was what the young man had told me), why try to see her again? My ex-wife had the right to look for happiness, and I should respect her decision. This idea lasted a little more than four hours; later in the afternoon, I went to a church, lit a candle and made another promise, this time a sacred, ritual promise: to try and find her. Marie — Paulo Coelho

A friend of mine has a ritual: He writes a poem every day with his morning coffee. — Arianna Huffington

What a risk, Reuben thought. I could easily hit him over the head and rob the church of its gold candlesticks. He wondered how often Jim had done this kind of thing, or why Jim's life was such a round of sacrifice and exhausting work, how it was Jim could ladle up soup and corned beef hash every day for people who so often let him down, or go through the same ritual every morning at the altar, as if it really was a miracle when he consecrated the bread and wine and gave out "the Body of Christ" in tiny white wafers. — Anne Rice

When I arrived, he was in the kitchen, in the middle of his Sunday morning ritual of cleaning his cleaning supplies. — Lee Goldberg

Being a hermit involves a lot of what we would call routine tasks taken to an extreme, even the morning flush of the toilet becomes a ritual. — Steve Merrick

May I ask Master a question?"
"What is it you want to know, girl?"
"Does Master love his girl?"
He moved her into the railing, the intricate cast iron of the boundary around the balcony bit into her ass. Anyone walking by and looking up would see her naked. She knew that and he knew that.
"What does she think?" He parted her legs and stood between her open thighs. Her wrists still imprisoned in his hand hung over the barrier.
"Yes?"
"Every day for the last eight years I've worn her chain around my neck. A habit I couldn't break, a ritual like clockwork every morning. Her chain around my neck, my watch on my wrist. — April Vine

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. — Billy Williams

I'll give you my routine, my morning ritual: I get up, I do a bit of stretching, and then after showering and everything, I have a half cup of warm lemon water. I've been doing that forever. I love it. It just brightens everything for me. — Grace Hightower

Have you ever had one of those days where you give up on being really clean, and settle for being largely clean? Where you don't have time for the entire scrubbing and exfoliating regime, so you settle for the basics? Where brushing your teeth becomes the most rigorous part of your cleaning ritual? Yeah, welcome to Monday morning at St. Sophia's School for (Slightly Grimy) Girls. — Chloe Neill

Hyacinth said that it was a gift to greet a new day, and that you needed to meet it in a way that showed how grateful you were to have your life spared. Phaedra wasn't sure what Hyacinth meant, exactly, but she did like the routines and rituals they had, the way they made a kind of container so her mind could wander to the things she thought and felt and dreamed about. — Naomi Jackson

The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded cafe, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us. — Nicole Krauss

The best way to get quiet, other than the combination of extensive therapy, Prozac, and a lobotomy, is first to notice that the station is on. KFKD [K-Fucked] is on every single morning when I sit down at my desk. So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer
please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written. Sometimes ritual quiets the racket. Try it. Any number of things may work for you
an altar, for instance, or votive candles, sage smudges, small-animal sacrifices, especially now that the Supreme Court has legalized them. — Anne Lamott

The morning skate was a game-day ritual dating back to the seventies, introduced in North America by the Russians, and used as an attendance taking to make sure players who may have been out carousing the night before finished sweating the alcohol out of their system before the game. — Shawna Richer

I start every morning with a Rosicrucian ritual, meditation and exercise. I can't separate myself from this habit of connecting myself to the other realm every day, not anymore, because I'm actually more there than here. I always was, but now I know how to maintain this balance, even in solitude. — Robin Sacredfire

Every time we open one door, we close another. It's lovely to spend Sunday morning with our new love, cooking breakfast and taking a walk together. But in the midst of our happiness, we may feel nostalgia for our former Sunday morning ritual of uninterrupted time alone at a favorite restaurant reading the newspaper. We need to acknowledge the presence of both excitement and loss, to feel their rhythm as they ebb and flow through a new relationship. If we try to deny our losses, they lead to resentments, a gnawing discomfort, and a desire to withdraw.

Yet we also need to remind our ego that love means letting go of our entrenched rituals, of comparing, of wanting life to stay the same...Entering a relationship and living in the heart of the Beloved means our life will change, our shells will crack open and we will never be the same again. — Charlotte Kasl

I am not a churchgoing man. Strangled in the vines of form and choked with ritual Christians, Sunday service held no appeal for me as a child. When my parents released me from compulsory attendance, I would never return. In my view, religion is best practiced out of doors, in nature's cathedral of miracles where spirits and the arts of heaven mingle unencumbered. The spirits were present on the tiny unmarked parcel at Mount Vernon that early autumn afternoon.
Hazel and I stood for a long while in complete silence. Words would have marred, much as they misserve this inadequate telling of what we felt. We had been touched by wearied souls calling, in a language ethereal as morning mist, from the near realm that awaits us all.
These were 'our' ancestors and, alone behind an old wooden outbuilding, my wife and I had wordlessly worshiped with them on that clear crisp afternoon. — Randall Robinson

And I couldn't take my eyes off Pete. He ate dinner like he always did, in three or four huge, whoofing bites, before heading back out front to his cone of warmth, his coffee, his cigarettes, and ghostly tunes piping from his little transistor radio. And most important, to whatever thoughts drowned out the voices of his own family saying "hello" and "happy holidays."
I watched him because I couldn't believe that could be anyone's comfortable horizon. A tiny porch on a dark corner near a highway. We lucked out living on a planet made thrilling by billions of years of chance, catastrophe, miracles, and disaster, and he'd rejected it. You're offered the world every morning when you open your eyes. I was beginning to see Pete as a representative of all the people who shut that out, through cynicism, religion, fear, greed, or ritual. — Patton Oswalt

He paused at the bedroom door, shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and walked right out like it was any other morning, and he and Jack would be having breakfast as if they hadn't had sex the night before.
"Morning," he said, casting a quick glance over his shoulder.
"Mmm," D grunted.
"You done in the bathroom?"
D blinked. No, I jus' took a little breather in the middle a my mornin' beauty ritual ta come out here 'n' chat with ya. A course I'm done. — Jane Seville