Ritually Quotes & Sayings

Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society. — Robert D. Kaplan

Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems. Large universities make the futile attempt to match them by multiplying their courses, and they generally fail since they are bound to curriculum, course structure, and bureaucratic administration. In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up predetermined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern. — Ivan Illich

My high-school years were so mediocre - I moved out when I was 16 and started living with my girlfriend who was 10 years older. Apart from that, I was just a video nerd. — Jason Reitman

At that time I told myself that I didn't want to fall in love ever again. But that night while praying for your happiness Nana, I thought that despite all the wounds and all the pains it could cause I wanted to dream again, and love someone with all my heart. — Ai Yazawa

Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them: by understanding the present through the lens of the past. — Dara Horn

His easiness and self-assurance aggravate me, just like they did at the labs. It's so unfair, so different from how I feel, like I'm about to have a heart attack, or melt into a puddle. — Lauren Oliver

From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament ... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy. — Bernard Berenson

Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history. — Richard Rohr

I'm going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes. — Joe Theismann

Many ritually abusive cults deliberately divide the personality system down the middle of the head, making sure that there is no communication between the two sides. "Left side" parts might be instructed to speak to no one other than the perpetrators. — Alison Miller

People need to believe that they can participate fully in the decisions that affect their lives and have a stake in the societies in which they live — Jacqueline Novogratz

The good Jew is ritually observant and resists assimilation, in some sense living apart, never fitting comfortably into American or any other society. — Elliott Abrams

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion ... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. — Aldous Huxley

I think all negotiations should take place at a round table and everybody should have to rotate counterclockwise once an hour so that even the perception of head of the table, or foot, are ritually obliterated. — Pearl Cleage

This makes me feel ritually unclean. — Don DeLillo

I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them. — Sue Monk Kidd

I would say I'm more traditional than I am superstitious. I don't, for example, have to do things ritually before the game in order to feel comfortable going to the game. But I don't think I'm naturally a football player. I don't have that grit and that killer instinct. — Troy Polamalu

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance. — Ben Lerner

Randy is a member in good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured the process of being ritually goosed by the Government. He feels a strong impulse to drive straight to the nearest gun store and spend about ten thousand dollars. Not that he wants to hurt anyone; it's just that any kind of government authority gives him the creeps now. — Neal Stephenson

I just starred at him like he was trying to sell me the Sham-wow and the Slapchop for only $19.99 — Kevin Hearne

Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book? — Neal Stephenson

They never see anything - not even the cultists who weren't ritually blinded. — Dennis Liggio

When the great Greek cry breaks into the Latin of the Mass, as old as Christianity itself, it may surprise some to learn that there are a good many people in church who really do say kyrie eleison and mean exactly what they say. But anyhow, they mean what they say rather more than a man who begins a letter with "Dear Sir" means what he says. "Dear" is emphatically a dead word; in that place it has ceased to have any meaning. It is exactly what the Protestants would allege of Popish rites and forms; it is done rapidly, ritually, and without any memory even of the meaning of the rite. When Mr. Jones the solicitor uses it to Mr. Brown the banker, he does not mean that the banker is dear to him, or that his heart is filled with Christian love, even so much as the heart of some poor ignorant Papist listening to the Mass. — G.K. Chesterton

The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith. — Karen Armstrong

But what about the creatures whose flesh he's carrying there? A few days ago they were alive. They too have souls. They too are God's children. They were quite possibly made of better material than human beings. Since they were sinless, they were certainly more innocent. But day after day they are ritually sacrificed-angels in the shape of oxen, calves, sheep. I once wanted to become a vegetarian. I wanted everything-and I never got further than wanting. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used. — Andrea Dworkin

If you want to achieve just 1 percent dilution, then add only 6 drops of essential oils to an ounce of carrier oils. If you want 2 percent dilution, just add 12 drops of essential oils to an ounce of carrier oils. — Lindsey Pylarinos

For me, songwriting is something I have to do ritually. I don't just wait for inspiration; I try to write a little bit every day. — Sean Lennon

This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertise propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunate objects of their high and noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state. — Thomas Frank

Drowned in the lake, ravished by gypsies, struck by a passing motor car, she thought ritually, a sound principle being that nothing was ever as one imagined it, and this was an efficient means of excluding the worst. — Ian McEwan

You're such a dork.
But I'm your dork. — Ashley Royer

People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists. — Robert M. Pirsig

I don't buy comics anymore, for the most part. I eat my lunch off of them. — Jim Lee

Mr. Sambridge possessed a remarkably good mouthful of natural teeth for someone his age, whether ritually maintained or expensively corrected I could not tell.

As someone who has spent hours of agony strapped down in Dr. Frankenstein's chamber of dental horrors in Farrington Street, I could only respect - and hate - anyone who still possessed such a spotless set of choppers. — Alan Bradley

Writers are explorers who find new worlds and use words to bring them to our reality. — D. Anne Paris

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. — Camille Paglia

Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence. They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures.11 Every single person, object, or experience was seen as a replica, a pale shadow, of a reality that was stronger and more enduring than anything in their ordinary experience but that they only glimpsed in visionary moments or in dreams. By ritually imitating what they understood to be the gestures and actions of their celestial alter egos - whether gods, ancestors, or culture heroes - premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in their larger dimension of being. — Karen Armstrong

We are all called to be friends with Jesus. Don't be afraid to love the Lord. — Pope Francis

The truth has never been told about women in history: that everywhere man has gone woman has gone too, and what he has done she has done also. Women are ignorant of their own past and ignorant of their own importance in that past. — Pearl S. Buck

Inspiration means that you don't have to figure things out, or think about them. Ideas and answers pop into your head and the energy carries you forward, if you allow it. Planning ... is a way of ritually killing inspiration, which transcends the need for planning. — Chuck Spezzano

We perceive and interpret the outer world through a set of incredibly fine internal receptors. But we are incapable, by ourselves, of grasping or tweezing out any permanent, sharable figment of it. Practically speaking, we ritually verify what is there, and are disposed to call it reality. But, with photographs, we have concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating all our lives. — Max Kozloff

Passages in the Bible and Quran or Hadiths endorse holy war, subjugating or exterminating unbelievers, killing blasphemers and others who violate religious taboos, stoning adulterers, ritually slaughtering animals, sexually enslaving females, and beating children. They prescribe mutilation of criminal suspects. — Anonymous

She was trying to find the section that described the penalties for treason. She'd browsed through the section at one point and vaguely recalled a long list of punishments culminating with the guilty party being ritually trampled to death by the population of the village of Avebury, which seemed unlikely, or at least somewhat difficult to arrange. — Daniel O'Malley