Reverence Quotes

“The ceremonies that persist—birthdays, weddings, funerals— focus only on ourselves, marking rites of personal transition. […]

We know how to carry out this rite for each other and we do it well. But imagine standing by the river, flooded with those same feelings as the Salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Rise in their honor, thank them for all the ways they have enriched our lives, sing to honor their hard work and accomplishments against all odds, tell them they are our hope for the future, encourage them to go off into the world to grow, and pray that they will come home. Then the feasting begins. Can we extend our bonds of celebration and support from our own species to the others who need us?

Many indigenous traditions still recognize the place of ceremony and often focus their celebrations on other species and events in the cycle of the seasons. In a colonist society the ceremonies that endure are not about land; they’re about family and culture, values that are transportable from the old country. Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed there, but it seems they did not survive emigration in any substantial way. I think there is wisdom in regenerating them here, as a means to form bonds with this land.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart. That lightness is the surest litmus test I know for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel its stirrings in yourself. The questions that can lead us are already alive in our midst, waiting to be summoned and made real. It is a joy to name them. It is a gift to plant them in our senses, our bodies, the places we inhabit, the part of the world we can see and touch and help to heal. It is a relief to claim our love of each other and take that on as an adventure, a calling. It is a pleasure to wonder at the mystery we are and find delight in the vastness of reality that is embedded in our beings. It is a privilege to hold something robust and resilient called hope, which has the power to shift the world on its axis.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

“Respect cannot be inherited, respect is the result of right actions.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“A person does not reach the pinnacle of self-realization without relentlessly exploring the parameters of the self, exhausting their psychic energy coming to know oneself. Without society to rebel against and to sail away from, there would be no advances in civilization; there would be no need for healers and mystics, priests and artist, or shaman and writers. It is our curiosity and refusal to be satisfied with the status quo that compels us to challenge ourselves to learn and continue to grow. We only establish inner peace of mind with acceptance of the world, with the recognition of our connection to the entirety of the universe, and understanding that chaos and change are inevitable. We must also love because without love there are no acts of creation. Without love, humankind is a spasmodic pool of brutality and suffering. Love is a balm. It cures human aches and pains; it unites couples, families, and cultures. Love is a creative force, without love there is no art or religion. Art expresses thought and feelings, an articulation of adore and reverence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Every day is an opportunity to stand in awe when witnessing the overpowering presence of nature, an apt time to pay reverence for the inestimable beauty of life. I must remain mindful to live in an ethical manner by paying attention to the threat of injustice towards other people and resist capitulating to the absurdity of being a finite body born into infinite space and time. I am part of the world, a spar in a sacred composition, a body of energy suspended in the cosmos. I seek to create a poetic personal testament to life. When I pivot and turn away from fixating upon the cruel artifices of my encysted orbit to face and outwardly embrace the cleansing swirl of heaven’s windmill, I feel gusting in the shank of my marrow the thump of onrushing primordial truths, the electric flush of those ineffable couplets of life that one may not utter.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Each of us experiences the perpetual revival of the self. We constantly recast our connate emotional index by perceiving each encounter in life as a marvel, impedance, problem, disaster, or nothing at all. Living in the moment allows us to escape the lonely landscape of self-interest and be part of a larger world filled with beauty, reverence, and adoration.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity. By day, space is one with the earth and with man--it is his sun that is shining, his clouds that are floating past; at night, space is his no more.”
― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

“There is a way of beholding nature that is itself a form of prayer.”
― Diane Ackerman, The Moon by Whale Light and Other Adventures Among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales

“We are among the first peoples in human history who do not broadly inherit religious identity as a given, a matter of kin and tribe, like hair color and hometown. But the very fluidity of this—the possibility of choice that arises, the ability to craft and discern one’s own spiritual bearings—is not leading to the decline of spiritual life but its revival. It is changing us, collectively. It is even renewing religion, and our cultural encounter with religion, in counterintuitive ways. I meet scientists who speak of a religiosity without spirituality—a reverence for the place of ritual in human life, and the value of human community, without a need for something supernaturally transcendent. There is something called the New Humanism, which is in dialogue about moral imagination and ethical passions across boundaries of belief and nonbelief.
But I apprehend— with a knowledge that is as much visceral as cognitive— that God is love. That somehow the possibility of care that can transform us— love muscular and resilient— is an echo of a reality behind reality, embedded in the creative force that gives us life.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

“We seldom look up to the person; we usually look up to their persona.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“An enlightened person strives to live a meaningful life, defined by their personal humility joy, passion, and profound reverence for life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Karate is not A religion, cult or dogma. It is incumbent on every generation of martial artists, to find the weaknesses of the previous generations, not to revere it . . .”
― Soke Behzad Ahmadi, Shorinjiryu Ryujin Kenpo

“If we have reverence for God, we will have respect for one another.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“So, Mary is on fire with both love and awareness, for these two together increase each other into sacred passion. She defies all custom, seizes the moment, rushes in, and, full of reverence, washes His feet with her tears and anoints His head with precious spikenard oil.”
― Steve Sanchez, Rethinking Redemption

“... We are in a system that doesn't give a rap about sacredness.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, Driftworks

“I must be able to say, 'Percival, a ridiculous name'. At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up and follow behind him. How strange to oar one's way through crowds seeing life through hollow eyes, burning eyes.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“As you get to know what takes you away from life, you have more moments throughout your day where your mind, body and heart are all right here, and you discover a reverence for all moments, beings and things,. You will then give to Life one the most powerful gifts any human being can, the gift of your undivided attention.”
― Mary O'Malley

“Whether truth--be it religious or moral truth--speak eloquently and in well-chosen language or not, its voice should be heard with reverence.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“Man's delight in the Lord is the absolute peak of human triumph. He praises God when full of joy, and when not, he praises God to become full of joy. For to know and to live as though God is worthy of all praise, in all one's circumstances, whether seemingly good or seemingly bad, is the primary definition of joy and the richest triumph for man under God.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Across the board at the office there was a belief, an unproved theorem, about Coinman’s blind faith in Ratiram: that if one thought Coinman would willingly sip a cup of botulinum if Ratiram wished it, one still underestimated the reverence that dwelt in Coinman’s heart for Ratiram.”
― Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy

“The royal pursuit is reverence of God.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Love, reverence, and adoration, are multifaceted emotions. Similar to a painting by an artist, how we respond to a beautiful woman, nature, and the world that we encounter reveals the spectator and not life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We foster personal meaning out of life by exulting in all of nature, exhibiting a reverence for people, animals, plants, and by expressing compassion and sympathy for the entire community of life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“I painlessly came to realize that the reverence I felt for the holiness of life is not ever likely to be entirely at home in organized religion. It was later, when I was able to travel farther , that the presence of holiness and mystery seemed, as far as my vision was able to see, to descend into the windows of Chartres, the stone peasant figures of Autun, the tall sheets of gold on the walls of Torcello that reflected the light of the sea; in the frescoes of Piero, of Giotto; in the shell of a church wall in Ireland still standing on a floor of sheep-cropped grass with no ceiling other than he changing sky.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“The proof comes after belief, not before.”
― Amar Ochani

“The reverence of God is grace to act right.”
― Lailah Gfty Akita

“The consciousness of Divine friendship in devotion, so far from being impaired, is deepened by holy veneration. The purest and most lasting human friendships are permeated with an element of reverence; much more this friendship of a man with God.”
― Austin Phelps, The Still Hour

“The Reverence of God is root of right reason.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“The Reverence of God is the greatest treasure.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North, an appellation I think Beck would have approved of, for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names.”
― Alice Hoffman