Rituals are the end of fidelity and honesty, and the beginning of confusion.
Many successful people get up before 6am in the morning. They have rituals. They exercise, stretch, organize their day, and walk through that series of rituals.
There is a comfort in rituals, and rituals provide a framework for stability when you are trying to find answers.
The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.
A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
I am tolerably ignorant about Judaism, and much of what I do know about it seems hard to swallow, because it is so grounded in legalism, and adherence to rituals.
You have to know your triggers for stress and then have rituals for combating them.
When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.
A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.
Sycamore trees were held to be sacred in ancient Egypt and are the first trees represented in ancient art. The sycamore, also, was sacred. Peasants gather around them in rituals. In the Land of the Dead there was a sycamore in whose branches the goddess Hathor lived; she leaned out of it giving sustenance and water to deceased souls. In Memphis, Hathor's epithet was Lady of the Sycamore.
Whether we're conscious of it or not, our work and personal lives are made up of daily rituals, including when we eat our meals, how we shower or groom, or how we approach our daily descent into the digital world of email communication.
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
What I do is look at ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. The rituals of how they dress. . . . There's a lot of tribalism in the collections.
The sacred is not in heaven or far away. It is all around us, and small human rituals can connect us to its presence. And of course the greatest challenge (and gift) is to see the sacred in each other.
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.
We should think of a photographer as a Samurai who makes rituals, moves and gestures in order to develop his techniques and his instinct.
The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine - that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they're talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.
Rituals keep us from forgetting what must not be forgotten and keep us rooted in a past from which we must not be disconnected.
Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.
It is indeed remarkable that the nature of our dealings with our fellowmen will determine, in large measure, our status in the kingdom of heaven. . . . We may attend to rites and rituals and yet overlook the weightier matters such as brotherly kindness, honesty, mercy, virtue, and integrity. Let us never forget that if we omit them from our lives we may be found unworthy to come into His presence.
