Quotations

«Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.»

«The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.»

«It?s a secret, religious, weird, ceremonial rite of passage for girls that women know. Hopscotch, it was bizarre for boys, ?cause they never played it, and as a boy, I was behind walls, going, ?What- what happened? What did they do? What do they do here?? And they had a track laid out with numbers, mystic numbers- 1, 5? 7, 8, you know? A bit of a broken doll there, some girl keeping lookout with a skipping rope?»

«The pious sectarian is proud because he is confident of his right of possession in God. The man of devotion is meek because he is conscious of God?s right of love over his life and soul. The object of our possession becomes smaller than ourselves, and without acknowledging it in so many words the bigoted sectarian has an implicit belief that God can be kept secured for certain individuals in a cage which is of their own make. In a similar manner the primitive races of men believe that their ceremonials have a magic influence upon their deities. Sectarianism is a perverse form of worldliness in the disguise of religion; it breeds a narrowness of heart in a greater measure than the cult of the world based upon material interest can ever do. For undisguised pursuit of self has its safety in openness, like filth exposed to the sun and air. But the self-magnification with its consequent lessening of God that goes on unchecked under the cover of sectarianism loses its chance of salvation because it defiles the very source of purity.»

«Everyone shall be given their ceremonial send-off after their marriage. O Nanak, blessed are the happy soul-brides, who are in love with their Husband Lord.»

«What good are the ceremonial lines drawn around your kitchen, when these four are seated there with you?»

«After their death, where will they be sent? The sixty-eight sacred shrines of pilgrimage give them no place of protection, and no Brahmin will eat their food. They remain polluted forever, day and night; they do not apply the ceremonial tilak mark to their foreheads. They sit together in silence, as if in mourning; they do not go to the Lord's Court.»

«This body is the residence of God. The food you take is the offering you make to him. Your act of bathing is the ceremonial bathing of Him who is in You. The ground you walk on is His domain. The joy you gain is His gift. The grief you experience is His lesson. Remember Him ever, in sun and rain, day and night, asleep and awake.»