Profane Quotes

“I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was 'breaking the Lord's fourth commandment,' and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“And remember: the flesh is as sacred as it is profane.”
― Brian McGreevy, Hemlock Grove

“That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“In Newcastle, Kurt announced from the stage, “I am a homosexual, I am a drug user, and I fuck pot-bellied pigs,” another classic Cobainism, though only one of his three claims was true.”
― Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain

“This decorum and etiquette, the whole self-stylization of the upper class, demand among other things that one does not allow oneself to be portrayed as one really is, but according to how one must appear to conform with certain hallowed conventions, remote from reality and the present time. Etiquette is the highest law not merely for the ordinary mortal, but also for the king, and in the imagination of this society even the gods accept the forms of courtly ceremonial.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“It must be added at once that such a profane existence is never found in the pure state. To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

“It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from a profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as a cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.”
― Willard R. Trask, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

“In a sacred landscape, only time is profane.”
― Enrique Lamadrid, Nuevo México Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland

“The language of life is profane as it is eloquent.”
― Erwin D. Maramat

“This rigid dichotomy of holy and profane, of vowed and unvowed…it sterilizes us. Not everyone fits into those boxes to begin with, almost no one fits entirely into them, and then there are those of us who experience God so differently from what is sanctioned and prescribed that even the mere idea of boxes is…limiting.”
― Sierra Simone

“Disgust for things external to us thus provides the strongest possible contrast to the sacredness of things internal to our lifeways.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“Love, sex, and eroticism, with their hormone rush and idealized images, on the one hand, and deep frustrations, on the other, have been variably perceived as either a major source of transcedence or the nadir of the profane.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Philosophy should address every aspect of our lives — the sacred, the profane, and even the mundane.”
― Scott Hershovitz, Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids