{"quotes":[{"text":"His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.","author":"Carol Shields","tags":["discipline","practice","ritual","work"],"id":7947,"author_id":"Carol+Shields"},{"text":"The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.","author":"Annette Simmons","tags":["community","illusions","interdependence","ritual","stories","storytelling"],"id":27227,"author_id":"Annette+Simmons"},{"text":"Jiu Jitsu is a baptism by combat, and serves a purpose in the inner life of the individual that has always existed, but our modern culture fails to acknowledge.","author":"Chris Matakas","tags":["bjj","culture","growth","jiu-jitsu","martial-arts","ritual"],"id":32911,"author_id":"Chris+Matakas"},{"text":"The mystery religions were instituted in order to protect the marvels of the commonplace from those who would devalue them.","author":"Peter Redgrove","tags":["folklore","magic","magick","mystery-religions","mysthology","occult","ritual"],"id":35478,"author_id":"Peter+Redgrove"},{"text":"For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generatly it is a simple circle, dyutamandalam, drawn on the ground. The circle as such, however, has a magic significance. It is drawn with great care, all sorts of precautions being taken against cheating. The players are not allowed to leave the ring until they have discharged their obligations. But, sometimes a special hall is provisionally erected for the game, and this hall is holy ground. The Mahabharata devotes a whole chapter to the erection of the dicing hall - sabha - where the Pandavas are to meet their prtners. Games, of chance, therefore, have their serious side. They are included in ritual.","author":"Johan Huizinga","tags":["game-theory","games","mahabharata","play","ritual"],"id":52065,"author_id":"Johan+Huizinga"},{"text":"I may appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but these rituals are important to me. I have many places where I sit and think, “I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again.” Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962 or 1983, or many other times. Sometimes Chaz comes along on my rituals, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she’s going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room and reading in bed. “Why don’t you go and touch your bases?” she’ll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. Sometimes on this voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.","author":"Roger Ebert","tags":["life","memory","reflection","ritual"],"id":52558,"author_id":"Roger+Ebert"},{"text":"Prayer is a path where there is none.","author":"Noah Benshea","tags":["prayer","religious","ritual"],"id":65807,"author_id":"Noah+Benshea"},{"text":"This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.","author":"Elizabeth Gilbert","tags":["ritual","spiritual"],"id":67543,"author_id":"Elizabeth+Gilbert"},{"text":"Take us to the in-between,Where earth meets sky, and wake meets dream.And time rushes by, unseen.Take us to the infinite night,Where up is down, and left is right,And dark vanquishes light.","author":"S.L. Stacy","tags":["greek-mythology","paranormal-romance","poetry","ritual"],"id":67691,"author_id":"S.L.+Stacy"},{"text":"Humans are amazing ritual animals, and it must be understood that the Tzutujil, nor any other real intact people, do not 'practice' rituals. Just as a bear must turn over stumps searching for beetles, real humans can only live life spiritually. Birth itself was a ritual: there was not a ritual for birth, or a ritual for death, or a ritual for marriage, for death was a ritual, life a ritual, cooking a ritual, and eating were all rituals with ceremonial guidelines, all of which fed life. Sleeping was a ritual, lovemaking was a ritual, sowing, cultivating, harvesting, storing food were rituals, even sweeping, insulting, fighting were rituals, everything human was a ritual, and to all Tzutujil, ritual was plant-oriented and based on feeding some big Holy ongoing vine-like, tree-like, proceedance that fed us it's fruit.","author":"Martin Prechtel","tags":["death","feeding-life","human","ritual"],"id":87453,"author_id":"Martin+Prechtel"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":69,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}