Top 1200 Religious Rituals Quotes & Sayings

Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man's traditional mistrust of the man who is not part of his tribe, that 'other' who speaks a different language, whose skin is a different color, and who participates in mysterious rites and rituals.

Rituals are how we step into our private field of dreams, a small Elysium all our own. Rituals are made not just for us, but for those we want to pass them on to.

Religious traditions are easy to lose sight of in today's marketing frenzy. Make sure you take time to gently usher your little ones into the rituals that have special meaning for you.

Forms and rituals do not produce worship, nor does the disuse of forms and rituals. We can use all the right techniques and methods, we can have the best possible liturgy, but we have not worshiped the Lord until Spirit touches spirit.

There are so many spiders, and their rituals, their mating rituals, their courtship ritual, can be very, very different.

I try not to have too many rituals because I believe that rituals don't help you win. I used to do rituals a lot and it was crazy.

God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all—no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.

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.

I am aware that I preach a religious doctrine understood and accepted by a very small part of the religious world, when I point out the relation of the religious concept to physical fitness.

It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity.

My brother, this "religiosity" is not the standard by which true men of God are measured. In all the rituals that Islam has, deeply imbedded in those rituals are principles of truth. And sometimes we get lost in the religiosity; we get lost in the "symbol," but we miss the substance of the truth that is buried in the ritual!

Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.

I'm very religious, you know. Now, OK, if by 'religious', you mean that I go to church every Sunday, read the bible faithfully, and I listen to Debbie Boone, umm, I'm not religious in that sense... But if by 'religious' you mean that I love others and try to help them whenever possible... Again, no. But if by 'religious' you mean that I like to eat coleslaw... Yeah, OK, OK!

Everyone talks about religious liberty, but no one believes it. So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

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.

It might kill you to say it, because the film really takes on the Catholic Church, but I do think there is a sort of affection for certain rituals, and an authenticity to the presentation of those rituals, in 'Mea Maxima Culpa.'

Government sponsorship of religious activity, including prayer services, sacred symbols, religious festivals, and the like, tends to secularize the religious activity rather than make government more ethical or religious.

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.

Every religious group, while perhaps a majority somewhere, is also inevitably a minority somewhere else. Thus, religious organizations should and do show tolerance toward members of other religious denominations.

Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Islam has a rich tradition of secular painting in spite of its ban on images. It is only in religious rituals that the use of pictorial representation is totally prohibited.

Religion is not an end in itself. One's union with God is the ultimate goal. There are so many religions because immature people tend to emphasize trivial differences instead of important likenesses. Differences between faiths lie in creeds and rituals rather than in religious principles.

The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

Love and kindness are the basis of my religious beliefs. The rituals and outward signs are not as important as one's actions and deeds. Religion should be a path to God, not something to fight about.

I'm not religious, but I've always been attracted to the rituals of religion; as a kid, Sunday church was the closest thing I had to an interactive, theatrical experience.

Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.

The Roman Catholic Church and its rituals were so much part of life that, although my parents would often question a small matter of dogma and none of us seemed more religious than anyone else, no one ever questioned the rituals or the basic tenets of belief.

All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.

I still noticed that little streak of rebelliousness coming up in me again - the same sense of dissatisfaction I had felt earlier with the empty rituals and institutionalized values of all religious traditions.

"The way of Cain" describes any religious system that attempts to earn God's favor by works and rituals rather than reliance on God's grace.

I live in a country where 90 or 95 percent of the people profess to be religious, and maybe they are religious, though my experience of religion suggests that very few people are actually religious in more than a conventional sense.

I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance.

You could also say that a precious brand often has rituals associated with it. They reinforce the specialness of the brand. And of course the brand owner can help ensure those rituals are created.

Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change.

I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

Essentially all civilizations that rose to the level of possessing an urban culture had need for two forms of science-related technology, namely, mathematics for land measurements and commerce and astronomy for time-keeping in agriculture and aspects of religious rituals.

What is remarkable about the Greeks - even pre-philosophically - is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn't look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens.

No, I'm not religious, I'm sorry to say. But I was once and shall be again. There is no time now to be religious." "No time. Does it need time to be religious?" "Oh, yes. To be religious you must have time and, even more, independence of time. You can't be religious in earnest and at the same time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and money and the Odéon Bar and all that.

Wherever there is a religious regime, over there there is ignorance, misery and absurdity! No religious state can ever elevate its own people! Sooner or later, the primitiveness of the religious administrations and the irrationality of the religious rules will cause a great collapse of those countries! The downfall is inevitable!

Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs--which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood.

I think the important thing to learn is that we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.

Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.

Throughout human history, people have developed strong loyalties to traditions, rituals, and symbols. In the most effective organizations, they are not only respected but celebrated. It is no coincidence that the most highly admired corporations are also among the most profitable. Why? Because everyone involved is committed to certain non-negotiable core values. Traditions keep them alive. Rituals such as special occasions reaffirm them. Symbols serve as constant reminders of their enduring importance.

To me, ideology is corrupt; it's a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you're an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you're religious, there's a mystery left there.

Rituals, even unhappy ones, provide a measure of comfort. Like a superstitious ballplayer who will only use certain bats, my depression rituals have become a fixed, normal part of my life. ... I need rituals to prevent unnecessarily rocking my already shaky emotional boat.

There is a comfort in rituals, and rituals provide a framework for stability when you are trying to find answers.

I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.

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.

Truth is not over there, wherever over there is. Truth is neither housed in religious rituals nor secret doctrines, nor in a guru's touch or beatific smile, nor in exotic locations or ancient temples. Truth is quite literally the only thing that does exist. It is not hidden but in plain view, not lacking but abundantly present.

Rituals are important. I get up. I take the dogs on a walk around to the front and then I pick up the papers. Then I walk around to the front door, then me and the two dogs come in the house and I give them treats. I make coffee. It's the regularity of these kinds of rituals that I find deeply satisfying.

Well I wasn't really attacking the religious beliefs [in the song 'The Vatican Rag'], I was attacking the formality of the rituals of the Catholic church; however, people took it wrongly.

Modern science developed in the context of western religious thought, was nurtured in universities first established for religious reasons, and owes some of its greatest discoveries and advances to scientists who themselves were deeply religious.

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.

In times past there were rituals of passage that conducted a boy into manhood, where other men passed along the wisdom and responsibilities that needed to be shared. But today we have no rituals. We are not conducted into manhood; we simply find ourselves there.

Those of us who preach religion: Preach the meaning of "ritual," and stop burying the people and enslaving the people by religious rituals, and then showing them a hypocritical example in leadership!

Secularism is not only indifferent to alternative religious systems, but as a religious ideology it is opposed to any other religious systems. It is therefore a closed system.

I am not a believer in religious rituals. I was brought up in the Arya Samaj environment which taught us to shun rituals. Puja, of course, but simple, elegant and brief.

I really love the traditional aspects of Judaism. My wife is born and raised a Catholic and I enjoy celebrating those rituals as well. I am very spiritual but not in any way religious, no.

I think it is appropriate that we pay tribute to this great constitutional principle which is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution: the principle of religious independence, of religious liberty, of religious freedom.

I don't like to say that my kitchen is a religious place, but I would say that if I were a voodoo priestess, I would conduct my rituals there.

All my life I have made it a rule never to permit a religious man or woman take for granted that his or her religious beliefs deserved more consideration than non-religious beliefs or anti-religious ones. I never agree with that foolish statement that I ought to respect the views of others when I believe them to be wrong.