Quotes about cathedral (122 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“God? Christ. The Virgin. This Guadalajara is so rich in cathedrals, so rich in appearances, that I am sure that these are the true foundations of the city and its misfortune: the rain washes away the sin of this world…”

José Baroja book Sueño en Guadalajara y otros cuentos

God , Christ , Appearance , World

“It's dangerous & humiliating. The whalers killed whales while green peace watched. Now, you don't walk by a child that is being abused, you don't walk by a kitten that is being kicked to death and do nothing. So I find it abhorrent to sit there and watch a whale being slaughtered and do nothing but "bear witness" as they call it. I think it was best illustrated a few years ago, the contradictions that we have, when a ranger in Zimbabwe shot and killed a poacher that was about to kill a black rhinoceros and uh human rights groups around the world said "how dare you? Take a human life to protect an animal". I think the rangers' answer to that really illustrated a hypocrisy. He said "Ya know, if I lived in, If I was a police officer in Herrari and a man ran out of Bark Place Bank with a bag of money and I shot him in the head in front of everybody and killed him, you'd pin a medal on me and call me a national hero. Why is that bag of paper more valued than the future heritage of this nation?" This is our values. WE fight, WE kill, WE risk our lives for things we believe in… Imagine going into Mecca, walk up to the black stone and spit on it. See how far you get. You’re not going to get very far. You’re going to be torn to pieces. Walk into Jerusalem, walk up to that wailing wall with a pick axe, start whacking away. See how far you’re going to get, somebody is going to put a bullet in your back. And everybody will say you deserved it. Walk into the Vatican with a hammer, start smashing a few statues. See how far you’re going to get. Not very far. But each and every day, ya know, people go into the most beautiful, most profoundly sacred cathedrals of this planet, the rainforests of the Amazonia, the redwood forests of California, the rainforests of Indonesia, and totally desecrate & destroy these cathedrals with bulldozers, chainsaws and how do we respond to that? Oh, we write a few letters and protest; we dress up in animal costumes with picket signs and jump up and down; but if the rainforests of Amazonia and redwoods of California, were as, or had as much value to us as a chunk of old meteorite in Mecca, a decrepit old wall in Jerusalem or a piece of old marble in the Vatican, we would literally rip those pieces limb from limb for the act of blasphemy that we’re committing but we won’t do that because nature is an abstraction, wilderness is an abstraction. It has no value in our anthropocentric world where the only thing we value is that which is created by humans.”

Paul Watson (1950) Canadian environmental activist

Life , Death , Money , People

“The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful.”

Francis S. Collins (1950) Geneticist; Director of the National Institutes of Health

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), p. 211

God , Beauty

“Lesson one: If you're ever in a beautiful cathedral, take your hat off!”

Ben Kowalewicz (1975) musician

From "The Diary of Billy Talent":

Beauty

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry book Flight to Arras

Les pierres du chantier ne sont en vrac qu’en apparence, s’il est, perdu dans le chantier, un homme, serait-il seul, qui pense cathédrale.
Pilote de Guerre (1942) (translated into English as Flight to Arras)

“Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.”

Anatoli Boukreev (1958–1997) Russian mountain climber

Religion , Mountain

“A genius is not very likely to ever discover himself; neither is he very likely to be discovered by his intimates; in fact I think I may put it in stronger words and say it is impossible that a genius—at least a literary genius—can ever be discovered by his intimates; they are so close to him that he is out of focus to them and they can't get at his proportions; they cannot perceive that there is any considerable difference between his bulk and their own. They can't get a perspective on him, and it is only by a perspective that the difference between him and the rest of their limited circle can be perceived. St. Peter's cannot be impressive for size to a person who has always seen it close at hand and has never been outside of Rome; it is only the stranger, approaching from far away in the Campania, who sees Rome as an indistinct and characterless blur, with the mighty cathedral standing up out of it all lonely and unfellowed in its majesty. Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered—either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into notice.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), pp. 57–58

War , Thinking , Personality

“That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”

Virginia Woolf book Moments of Being

"A Sketch of the Past"
Moments of Being (1939-1940)

Childhood

“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.”

Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) German-born British scholar

An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1942] 1957), p. 23.

“Our modern worship of empty ideals is ludicrous. What does the condition of the rabble matter? All we need do is to keep it as quiet as we can. What is more important, is to perpetuate those things of beauty which are of real value because involving actual sense-impressions rather than vapid theories. "Equality" is a joke — but a great abbey or cathedral, covered with moss, is a poignant reality. If it is for us to safeguard and preserve the conditions which produce great abbeys, and palaces, and picturesque walled town, and vivid sky-lines of steeples and domes, and luxurious tapestries, and fascinating books, paintings and statuary, and colossal organs and noble music, and dramatic deeds on embattled fields — these are all there is of life: take them away and we have nothing which a man of taste or spirit would care to live for. Take them away and our poets have nothing to sing — our dreamers have nothing to dream about. The blood of a million men is well shed in producing one glorious legend which thrills posterity and it is not at all important why it was shed.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (10 February 1923), published in Selected Letters Vol. I (1965), p. 208
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

Life , Men , Books , Beauty

“I am working as hard as I possibly can, and do not even dream of doing anything except the cathedral. It is an immense task.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in a letter from to his art-dealer Durand-Ruel, 30 March 1893; as quoted in: Christoph Heinrich (2000), Monet, p. 57
1890 - 1900

Dreams

“There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Light , Winter

“Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Fear , Heart

“An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.”

Jerome Lawrence Inherit the Wind

Source: Inherit the Wind

Idea , Knowledge , Water , Parting

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”

Janet Frame (1924–2004) New Zealand author

Imagination

“A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, pages 243-244
Source: 1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Life , God , Music , Tree

“… it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle. In the Cathedral”

Franz Kafka book The Trial

Variant: No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.
Source: The Trial (1920), Chapter 9

Lying , Universe

“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.”

Violette Leduc (1907–1972) French writer

Source: Mad in Pursuit

Music , Solitude , Grass , Summer

“The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of _____; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected.”

Anthony Trollope book The Warden

Source: The Warden (1855), Ch. 1, first lines

Question , Personality

“Calica keeps cursing the filth and, whenever he treads on one of the innumerable turds lining the streets, he looks at his dirty shoes instead of at the sky or a cathedral outlined in space. He does not smell the intangible and evocative matter of which Cuzco is made, but only the odor of stew and excrement. It's a question of temperament.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Letter to his mother from Cuzco, Peru (22 August 1953); as quoted in "Making of a Marxist" in The Guardian (16 June 2001) http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,507694,00.html

Shoe , Question

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (p. 52)

“I have read somewhere of a sermon preached by one of these in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. This old priest, among other things, said that the soul of a beggar was as dear to God as the soul of the richest of his people, and that Jesus Christ died as much for a beggar as for a prince. One French peasant, rough with labor, cried out: “I propose three cheers for Jesus Christ.””

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

I like such things. I like to hear of them. I like to repeat them.
My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

God , People , Soul , Reading

“Pugin says in one of his works that had he a cathedral to build, one of the first things he would do would be to set up a lathe to turn the smaller columns.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 2

“All the art since the Renaissance seemed too men-oriented. I liked (the) object quality. An Egyptian pyramid, a Sung vase, the Romanesque church appealed to me. The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedral or even a splatter of tar on the road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience than either geometric or action painting.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Source: 1969 - 1980, In: "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper," 1987, p. 9 : 'Notes from 1969'

Men , Art , Painting

“People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Französische Bühne (The French Stage), ch. 9 (1837)
Original: (de) Die Menschen in jener alten Zeit hatten Überzeugungen, wir Neueren haben nur Meinungen, und es gehört etwas mehr als eine bloße Meinung dazu, um so einen gotischen Dom aufzurichten.

People , Time

“Christopher Wren, the leading architect of London's reconstruction after the great fire of 1666, lies buried beneath the floor of his most famous building, St. Paul's cathedral. No elaborate sarcophagus adorns the site. Instead, we find only the famous epitaph written by his son and now inscribed into the floor: “si monumentum requiris, circumspice”—if you are searching for his monument, look around. A tad grandiose, perhaps, but I have never read a finer testimony to the central importance—one might even say sacredness — of actual places, rather than replicas, symbols, or other forms of vicarious resemblance.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"A Tale of Two Work Sites", p. 251
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Search , Reading

“As you can see this is a composition of vertical and horizontal lines which will (in an abstract manner) have to express the idea of rising upwards, of magnitude. This is the same idea which used, for example, to be the guiding principle in the construction of cathedrals. Since only the manner of expression and not the representation has to express this general idea, I have not given any title. An abstract human mind will, of itself, receive the intended impression. I always confine myself to expressing the general.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in Mondrian's letter to Theo van Doesburg, Amsterdam, 1915; as cited in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 234 (transl. Daphne Woodward)
1910's

Idea

“People use the word "natural" … What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is four years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the sunday school teachings.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

LSD: Methods of Control (1966)

People , School , Nature

“The whole system of symbolism impressed on the art and the life of the Middle Ages must awaken the admiration of poets in all times. In reality, what colossal unity there is in Christian art, especially in its architecture! These Gothic cathedrals, how harmoniously they accord with the worship of which they are the temples, and how the idea of the Church reveals itself in them! Everything about them strives upwards, everything transubstantiates itself; the stone buds forth into branches and foliage, and becomes a tree; the fruit of the vine and the ears of corn become blood and flesh; the man becomes God; God becomes a pure spirit. For the poet, the Christian life of the Middle Ages is a precious and inexhaustibly fruitful field. Only through Christianity could the circumstances of life combine to form such striking contrasts, such motley sorrow, such weird beauty, that one almost fancies such things can never have had any real existence, and that it is all a vast fever-dream the fever-dream of a delirious deity. Even Nature, during this sublime epoch of the Christian religion, seemed to have put on a fantastic disguise; for oftentimes though man, absorbed in abstract subtilties, turned away from her with abhorrence, she would recall him to her with a voice so mysteriously sweet, so terrible in its tenderness, so powerfully enchanting, that unconsciously he would listen and smile, and become terrified, and even fall sick unto death.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Religion and Philosophy in Germany, A fragment https://archive.org/stream/religionandphilo011616mbp#page/n5/mode/2up, p. 26

Life , Death , God , Age

“Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the growing point of the cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at least? Or was he one of many million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the universal view than rats in a cathedral? And again, was man’s true function power, or wisdom, or love, or worship, or all of all these? Or was the idea of function, of purpose, meaningless in relation to the cosmos? These grave questions I would answer.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter II: Interstellar Travel (pp. 17-18)

Love , Wisdom , Idea , Question

“The moral ideal has disappeared in all that has to do with international relations. The gain-seeking impulse supported by brute force has taken its place, and so far as the surface of things is concerned human civilization has gone back a full thousand years. Inconceivable though it be, we are brought face to face in this twentieth century with governments of peoples once great and highly civilized, whose word now means absolutely nothing. A pledge is something not to be kept, but to be broken. Cruelty and national lust have displaced human feeling and friendly international co-operation. Human life has no value, and the savings of generations are wasted month by month and almost day by day in mad attempts to dominate the whole world in pursuit of gain.
How has all this been possible? What has happened to the teachings and inspiring leadership of the great prophets and apostles of the mind, who for nearly three thousand years have been holding before mankind a vision of the moral ideal supported by intellectual power? What has become of the influence and guidance of the great religions Christian, Moslem, Hebrew, Buddhist with their counsels of peace and good-will, or of those of Plato and of Aristotle, of St. Augustine and of St. Thomas Aquinas, and of the outstanding captains of the mind Spanish, Italian, French, English, German who have for hundreds of years occupied the highest place in the citadel of human fame? The answer to these questions is not easy. Indeed, it sometimes seems impossible.
Are we, then, of this twentieth century and of this still free and independent land to lose heart and to yield to the despair which is becoming so widespread in countries other than ours? Not for one moment will we yield our faith or our courage! We may well repeat once more the words of Abraham Lincoln: "Most governments have been based on the denial of the equal rights of men, ours began by affirming those rights. We made the experiment, and the fruit is before us. Look at it think of it!"
However dark the skies may seem now, however violent and apparently irresistible are the savage attacks being made with barbarous brutality upon innocent women and children and non-combatant men, upon hospitals and institutions for the care of the aged and dependent, upon cathedrals and churches, upon libraries and galleries of the world s art, upon classic monuments which record the architectural achievements of centuries we must not despair. Our spirit of faith in the ultimate rule of the moral ideal and in the permanent establishment of liberty of thought, of speech, of worship and of government will not, and must not, be permitted to weaken or to lose control of our mind and our action.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

Life , Women , Men , Children

“We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of western European painting. Instead of making 'cathedrals' out of Christ, man, or 'life', we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings..”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 127

Life , Feeling , Nostalgia , Memory

“Acting is not what I do. It's what I am. It's my permanent, built-in cathedral.”

Anne Baxter (1923–1985) American actress

"Anne Baxter Dies at 62, 8 Days After Her Stroke" (1985)

“Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

As quoted in Sketchbook 1966-1971 (1971) by Max Frisch, p. 230
1970s

“In the Middle Ages people built cathedrals, where the whole town would get together and make a thing that's greater than any individual person could do and the society would kind of revel in that. We don't do that as much anymore, but in a sense this is kind of like building a cathedral.”

Hal Abelson (1947) computer scientist

Source: Auditing Classes at M.I.T. http://education.mit.edu/tep/11125/opencourse/ - New York Times Interview, pg. 1

People , Age , Sense , Personality

“Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children, and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands--millions--of eyes and noses. Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn't smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer--he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"The Sound of Music," p. 697
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Children , Smile , Way , Feeling

“filled with boredom, the winter days were here. A threadbare and patchy, too-short mantle of snow was spread over the reddened earth. It was too meagre for the many roofs, which remained black or rust coloured, shingled roofs like arks and thatched cottages, concealing within them the smoke-blackened expanses of attics—charred-black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, purlins and joists, dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, blown out by the nocturnal gale—black pipes of the Devil’s organs.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Birds” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops/birds.htm
His father, The seasons

Winter , Night

“In use of the broad powers with which I have been invested, I have found it proper to declare that
1. Priests of any cult who, abusing their ministry, excite hate or disrespect for our laws, our government, or its rights, will be punished by three years’ imprisonment or deportation.
2. Because of the present crisis all cathedral chapters are suppressed, except for that of Guadalajara because of its patriotic behavior.
3. Priests of all cults are forbidden from wearing their vestments or any other distinguishing garment outside of the churches… All violators will be punished with fines of ten to one hundred pesos or imprisonment from fifteen to sixty days.”

Benito Juárez (1806–1872) President of Mexico during XIX century

Proclamation in response to church officials openly encouraging support for French forces. (30 August 1862)

Hate , Law , Behavior

“New York is basically a new version of York. But York just got a cathedral…”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

Radio 2 Show (2007–2008)

“I will neither resurrect the past nor return.
Sleep, Romeo, Juliet, on your headrest of stone feathers.
I won't raise your bound hands from the ashes.
Let the cat visit the deserted cathedrals,
its pupil flashing on the altars. Let an owl
nest on the dead ogive.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Farewell" (1945), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
Rescue (1945)

Cats , Sleep , Past , Dead

“In the latter days of July in the year 185-, a most important question was for ten days hourly asked in the cathedral city of Barchester, and answered every hour in various ways — Who was to be the new Bishop?”

Anthony Trollope book Barchester Towers

First lines
Barchester Towers (1857)

Way , Question

“Some intellectuals’ downplaying of objective reality and enduring criteria extends beyond social, scientific, or economic phenomena into art, music, and philosophy. The one over-riding consistency across all these disparate venues is the self-exaltation of the intellectuals. Unlike great cultural achievements of the past, such as magnificent cathedrals, which were intended to inspire kings and peasants alike, the hallmark of self-consciously “modern” art and music is its inaccessibility to the masses and often even its deliberate offensiveness to, or mockery of, the masses.
Just as a physical body can continue to live, despite containing a certain amount of microorganisms whose prevalence would destroy it, so a society can survive a certain amount of forces of disintegration within it. But that is very different from saying that there is no limit to the amount, audacity and ferocity of those disintegrative forces which a society can survive, without at least the will to resist.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: 2010s, Intellectuals and Society (2010), Ch. 22 : The Influence of Intellectuals

Art , Music , Reality , Past

“It was the desire for living, vital expression.... which built Gothic cathedrals, which created Mozart sonatas. I believe it is going to stay that way for long time to come.”

August Macke (1887–1914) German painter of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter

In 'The New Program' (1914) - first appeared in Das neue Program, Kunst und Künstler 12. (March 1914)

Way , Time

“In the Middle Ages, people still reckoned on God - the cathedrals they built make that plain. But as time went by man tried to get rid of God. Marxism is nothing else than a gigantic attempt to put God on the shelf. They have tried to replace Him by technology. Scholars, in their attempt to prove that God does not exist, have resorted to the pen. And the masses have shouted: "Religion is the opium of the people.”

Wilhelm Busch (pastor) (1897–1966) German pastor and writer

Not for me! We use it when we shouldn't. p. 157
Jesus Our Destiny

God , People , Age , Religion

“Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

"The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany" (1834)

Love , God , War , Rage

“Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don't be subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts. Forget hours, seconds and minutes. Accept instability. Live in Time. Be static - with movement. For a static of the present movement. Resist the anxious wish to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living.
Stop insisting on 'values' which can only break down. Be free, live. Stop painting time. Stop evoking movements and gestures. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present, live once more in Time and by Time - for a wonderful and absolute reality”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

Original text in German:
Es bewegt sich alles, Stillstand gibt es nicht. Lasst Euch nicht von überlebten Zeitbegriffen beherrschen. Fort mit den Stunden, Sekunden und Minuten. Hört auf, der Veränderlichkeit zu widerstehen. SEID IN DER ZEIT – SEID STATISCH, SEID STATISCH – MIT DER BEWEGUNG. Fur Statik. Im Jetzt stattfindenden JETZT... Lasst es sein, Kathedralen und Pyramiden zu bauen, die zerbröckeln wie Zuckerwerk. Atmet tief, lebt Jetzt, lebt auf und in der Zeit. Für eine schöne und absolute Wirklichkeit!
In For Statics (original title: Für Statik), 1958 programmatic text for the 'Concert for Seven Pictures' in Düsseldorf: as quoted in: Arts/Canada. Vol. 25. (1968) p. 4.
Quotes, 1950's

Reality , Time , Painting , Forgetting

“It is impossible to understand Art and the glory of its history without avowing religious spirituality and the mythical roots that lead us to the very reason of being of the artistic phenomenon. Without the one or the other there would be no Egyptian pyramids, nor those of ancient Mexico. Would the Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals have existed?”

Luis Barragán (1902–1988) Mexican architect

In his acceptance of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, 1980

Art , History , Understanding

“Insulting the Prophet is something that has been going on in Europe for a very long time. In Dante's Inferno, if you're interested in the 28th Canto, where Dante is being taken on his conducted tour of hell and guided by Virgil, he comes across the Prophet Mohammed in the course of his eternal damnation. He is punished I quote Dante's words, as a seminator di scandalo e di scisma, a sower of scandal and of schism. Now, this is very insulting. In the great Cathedral of Bologna there is a wonderful set of pictures painted, if I remember rightly, in the 15th century depicting scenes from Dante's Inferno, including some very graphic pictures of Mohammed being tortured in hell by the devil very graphic.
Nobody did anything about this. A couple of years ago, the leaders of the Italian-Muslim community sent a polite request to the cathedral saying these are insulting to Muslims; would they mind covering those pictures. The cathedral administration said they would consider it. Nothing happened. The pictures are still in view.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

Quotes , Communication , Hell , Time

“Prosper Olander had never been in a cathedral, but now he felt something like that, the experience of entering suddenly a space so large, so devoted to a single purpose, that the insides of the heart are drawn for a moment outward and into it, trying to fill it, and failing.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Part One, Chapter 5
Four Freedoms (2009)

Heart

“Aurangzeb's purpose in building those three mosques was the same intentionally offensive political purpose that moved the Russians to build their Orthodox cathedral in the city-centre at Warsaw. Those mosques were intended to signify that an Islamic government was reigning supreme, even over Hinduism's holiest of holy places. I must say that Aurangzeb had a veritable genius for picking out provocative sites. Aurangzeb and Philip II of Spain are a pair. They are incarnations of the gloomily fanatical vein in the Christian - Muslim - Jewish family of religions. Aurangzeb - poor wretched misguided bad man - spent a lifetime of hard labour in raising massive monuments to his own discredit. Perhaps the Poles were really kinder in destroying the Russians' self-discrediting monument in Warsaw than you have been in sparing Aurangzeb's mosques.”

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) British historian, author of A Study of History

Arnold J. Toynbee in 'One World and India' (New Delhi, 1960) pp. 59-60

Family , Religion

“The courts are no longer cathedrals. They are…casinos where the throw of the dice matters.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Lina Gonsalves in: Women and Human Rights http://books.google.co.in/books?id=FBn_mCImoagC&pg=PA4, APH Publishing, 2001
At the Golden Jubilee Celebrations of the Supreme Court on the aspect of money and power getting precedence over justice.

“Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Prologue p. 8
The Sabbath (1951)

Learning , Time

“Christian doctors reproach the old learned rabbis, for their vain faith, and carnal desire of a glorious, temporal, outward Christ, who should set up their temple-worship all over the world. Vanity indeed, and learned blindness enough?
But nevertheless, in these condemners of rabbinic blindness, St. Paul's words are remarkably verified, viz., "Wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself, for thou that judgest dost the same thing." For, take away all that from Christ which Christian doctors call enthusiasm, suppose him not to be an inward birth, a new life and Spirit within us, but only an outward, separate, distant heavenly prince, no more really in us, than our high cathedrals are in the third heavens, but only by an invisible hand from his throne on high, some way or other raising and helping great scholars, or great temporal powers, to make a rock in every nation for his church to stand upon; suppose all this (which is the very marrow of modern divinity) and then you have that very outward Christ, and that very outward kingdom, which the carnal Jew dreamed of, and for the sake of which the spiritual Christ was then nailed to the cross, and is still crucified by the new risen Jew in the Christian church.”

William Law (1686–1761) English cleric, nonjuror and theological writer

¶ 159 - 160.
An Humble, Earnest and Affectionate Address to the Clergy (1761)

Life , World , Faith , Dreams

“Shopping Malls: Modern cathedrals to spending money. They’re designed to disorientate us and make us stay longer than we need to. Every brick is there to manipulate us to buy.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

Money

“The Hindu religion appears … as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance — crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Letters, Vol. II (1949) p. 53; also in The Soul of India (1974) by Satyavrata R Patel

Religion , Appearance

“In each of the cathedral churches there was a bishop, or an archbishop of fools, elected; and in the churches immediately dependent upon the papal see a pope of fools. These mock pontiffs had usually a proper suit of ecclesiastics who attended upon them, and assisted at the divine service, most of them attired in ridiculous dresses resembling pantomimical players and buffoons; they were accompanied by large crowds of the laity, some being disguised with masks of a monstrous fashion, and others having their faces smutted; in one instance to frighten the beholders, and in the other to excite their laughter: and some, again, assuming the habits of females, practised all the wanton airs of the loosest and most abandoned of the sex. During the divine service this motley crowd were not contended with singing of indecent songs in the choir, but some of them ate, and drank, and played at dice upon the altar, by the side of the priest who celebrated the mass. After the service they put filth into the censers, and ran about the church, leaping, dancing, laughing, singing, breaking obscene jests, and exposing themselves in the most unseemly attitudes with shameless impudence. Another part of these ridiculous ceremonies was, to shave the precentor of fools upon a stage erected before the church, in the presence of the populace; and during the operation, he amused them with lewd and vulgar discourses, accompanied by actions equally reprehensible. The bishop, or the pope of fools, performed the divine service habited in the pontifical garments, and gave his benediction to the people before they quitted the church. He was afterwards seated in an open carriage, and drawn about to the different parts of the town, attended by a large train of ecclesiastics and laymen promiscuously mingled together; and many of the most profligate of the latter assumed clerical habits in order to give their impious fooleries the greater effect; they had also with them carts filled with ordure, which they threw occasionally upon the populace assembled to see the procession. These spectacles were always exhibited at Christmas-time, or near to it, but not confined to one particular day.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 345
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Festival of Fools

People , Fools , Sex , Fashion

“One can only be staggered by the hubris of modern artists if we compare them, say, to the humble builders of Chartres Cathedral whose names are not even known. The artist ought to be distinguished by selfless devotion to duty; but we forgot about that a long time ago.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 189

Time

“Like many fields in their early stages, the software field has had its share of project disasters: the software equivalents of Beauvais Cathedral, the S. S. Titanic, and the "Galloping Gertie" Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The frequency of these disaster projects is a serious concern: a recent survey of 600 firms indicated that 35% of them had at least one "runaway' software project.”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Source: Software risk management: principles and practices (1991), p. 32

“Canterbury Cathedral: The first ever pocket watch was found in the walls of its cloister many hundreds of years ago. I decided to come, in the rain, to play with the locals and, if time permitted, attend the evening service.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Time

“Finally we hit upon the old cathedral of Amsterdam, which belongs to the Reformed Church and which we remodeled. The owners gave us permission, on certain financial conditions, to shoot the film there. Before that, we had planned to use the cathedral of Cologne, but two days before we began our preparations, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was shown on German television and the archbishop immediately forbade us from entering the cathedral site!”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From an interview in Positif, January 1994
Interviews

Lovers , Cooking

“No matter how close and familiar the temple or cathedral were to the people who lived around them, they remained in terrifying or elevating contrast to the daily life of the slave, the peasant, and the artisan—and perhaps even to that of their masters. Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is. The modes in which man and things are made to appear, to sing and sound and speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence. But these modes of negation pay tribute to the antagonistic society to which they are linked. Separated from the sphere of labor where society reproduces itself and its misery, the world of art which they create remains, with all its truth, a privilege and an illusion. In this form it continues, in spite of all democratization and popularization, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The “high culture” in which this alienation is celebrated has its own rites and its own style. The salon, the concert, opera. theater are designed to create and invoke another dimension of reality. Their attendance requires festive-like preparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience. Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of the day, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by the advancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is in turn refused; the “other dimension” is absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this society and circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psychoanalyzes the prevailing state of affairs.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 63-64

Life , People , Truth , World

“Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Life

“Essential to the Catholic mind is what I would characterize as a keen sense of the prolongation of the Incarnation throughout space and time, an extension that is made possible through the mystery of the church. Catholics see God’s continued enfleshment in the oil, water, bread, imposed hands, wine, and salt of the sacraments; they appreciate it in the gestures, movements, incensations, and songs of the Liturgy; they savor it in the texts, arguments, and debates of the theologians; they sense it in the graced governance of popes and bishops; they love it in the struggles and missions of the saints; they know it in the writings of Catholic poets and in the cathedrals crafted by Catholic architects, artists, and workers. In short, all of this discloses to the Catholic eye and mind the ongoing presence of the Word made flesh, namely Christ.”

Robert Barron (bishop) (1959) priest of the Roman Catholic Church, author, scholar and Catholic evangelist.

Father Barron, Robert. Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith (Kindle Locations 75-81). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Love , God , Sense , Water

“Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book An Inland Voyage

An Inland Voyage (1878).

“"It is undeniably beautiful, do you not agree?" Jarlaxle asked, looking back at the soaring cathedral, with its tall spires, soaring buttresses, and great, colored windows.
"The mask of a god," Entreri replied sourly.
"The mask or the face?" asked the always-surprising Jarlaxle.
Entreri stared hard at his companion, and back at the towering cathedral. "The mask," he said, "or perhaps the illusion, concocted by those who seek to elevate themselves above all others and have not the skills to do so."
Jarlaxle looked at him curiously.
"A man inferior with the blade or with his thoughts can still so elevate himself," Entreri explained curtly, "if he can impart the belief that some god or other speaks through him. It is the greatest deception in all the world, and one embraced by kings and lords, while minor lying thieves on the streets of Calimport and other cities lose their tongues for so attempting to coax the purses of others."
That struck Jarlaxle as the most poignant and revealing insight he had yet pried from the mouth of the elusive Artemis Entreri, a great clue as to who this man truly was.”

R. A. Salvatore book Servant of the Shard

Servant of the Shard

God , World , Beauty , Color

“The disturbing quality of life goes hand in hand with the disturbing quality of our time. The temporal emphasizes the perpetual... I willingly accept what I try to bring together. In the heads of my 'King and Queen' (Moore created in 1952/53] or in the head and the body of my 'Warrior' [1953/54], some mixture of degrees of realism is implicit. But we got used to this mixture in Chartres [the famous Gothic cathedral], and we shall get used to it again. I do not suggest that I have intentionally done it... It is just that in the head part I could focus, in essence, the intention of the entire figure... By contrasting the head to the natural structure of the rest, the whole idea of the figure is pointed out – it is these contrasts which do it.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Moore in 'Conversations with Henri Moore', J.P. Hodin, in 'The Observer', 24 Nov. 1958
1955 - 1970

Life , Idea , Nature , Time

“One of the influences in his design for the tower was the Tower of Babel the sense of building the impossible” that “has something mythic about it. The spaces inside the structure, in between the twisting steel, are “cathedral like”, according to Balmond, while according to Kapoor, the intention is that visitors will engage with the piece as they wind “up and up and in on oneself” on the spiral walkway.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

His views of Arcelormittal Orbit
Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

Sense

“Rubinstein was jealous of anybody who had a great success. He was jealous of the Beatles and kept on talking about their tremendous success. When Toscanini died there was a big service in St. Patrick's Cathedral presided over by Cardinal Spellman. Then after a month the body was sent to Milan where there was another big funeral. Rubinstein could not get over it. "Like a king!" he told me and Wanda. "He had two funerals!"”

Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1982) Polish-American classical pianist

He didn't like Paderewski, he didn't like Rachmaninoff, he was always criticizing everybody.
Vladimir Horowitz, quoted in Harold C. Schonberg, Horowitz: his life and music (1992)
About

Success

“The confusion of spirit and body is quite understandable in a culture where spirit is concretized in magnificent skyscrapers, where cathedrals have become museums for tourists, where woman-flesh-devil are associated, and nature is raped for any deplorable excuse. […] Dieting with fierce will-power is the masculine route; dieting with love of her own nature is the feminine. Her only real hope is to care for her own body and experience it as the vessel through which her Self may be born.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (1980), p. 100

Love , Hope , Understanding , Nature

“In the ancient cultural places of the world there was a temple, a church or a cathedral in its center. From there came the order of life. In every modern big city there is a bank building in its center. In my »Pied Piper« I have tried to depict this as a kind of demon cult, where money is something to be prayed to like something sacred. It's even being expressed there in words that it is »God«. It performs miracles, because the multiplication of money itself is yet a miracle. After all, the dealings there are with a miraculous multiplication of money. It has the character of everlastingness. But if there is anything that is just a purely man-made thing, then it's money.”

Michael Ende (1929–1995) German author

"Ende no yuigon" ["Ende's Last Message"] (May 1999), broadcast of an interview of February 1994, as quoted in "Michael Ende's Last Words to the Japanese" http://www.equilibrismus.de/en/topics/general/rm-michael_ende.htm at Equilibrism (Equilibrismus.de)

Life , Money , God , World

“[I believe in Oliver Cromwell] because he was a great fighting Dissenter. He was perhaps the first statesman to recognize that as soon as the Government became a democracy the Churches became directly responsible for any misgovernment. His great idea was to make Christ's law the law of the land, and any obstacle to this he ruthlessly swept away. How he would have dealt with Romish practices now! He said to the priest who babbled his Paternosters in Peterborough Cathedral, "Leave off your fooling and come down, sir." There was the man for the Ritualists (cheers)— worth a wagon-load of Bishops. How he would have dealt with the House of Lords! From the House of Commons he would have removed many a bauble, and he would have shaken his head and said, "The Lord deliver us from Joseph Chamberlain."”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the National Council of the Evangelical Free Churches at the City Temple, London (25 April 1899) for the 300th anniversary of Oliver Cromwell's birth, quoted in The Times (26 April 1899), p. 12.
Backbench MP

Law , Fools , Democracy , Idea

“[O]ne reason there is no socialism in America is because of Lincoln. In the American context Lincoln imparted to liberal democracy a sense of nobility and purpose that it has not always had in other contexts. He makes democracy something transcendent, and especially at Gettysburg where he talks about the nation having this new birth of freedom. He ratchets the horizons of liberal democracy right up past the spires of Cologne Cathedral and he makes it this glowing attractive ideal that people are willing to make these tremendous sacrifices to protect. Because at the end of the day this is what the Civil War is about—it’s about the preservation of liberal democracy. In the 1860s the United States was the last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing. What you had in the climate of mid-19th century Europe was the renaissance of romantic aristocracy.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

War , People , Democracy , Birth

“That it was actual and serious in France as in the Senate Chamber at Washington, proved itself at once by forcing Adams to buy an automobile, which was a supreme demonstration because this was the form of force which Adams most abominated. He had set aside the summer for study of the Virgin, not as a sentiment but as a motive power, which had left monuments widely scattered and not easily reached. The automobile alone could unite them in any reasonable sequence, and although the force of the automobile, for the purposes of a commercial traveller, seemed to have no relation whatever to the force that inspired a Gothic cathedral, the Virgin in the twelfth century would have guided and controlled both bag-man and architect, as she controlled the seeker of history.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Travel , History , Motivation , Study

“Mondrian began with his paintings of the seashore, with blue trees and the cathedral. These paintings were totally symbolist paintings... Until the very end Mondrian remains a Symbolist and an Expressionist.”

Anselm Kiefer (1945) German painter and sculptor

(1986) n.p.
Structures are no longer valid', in "Ein Gespräch..."

Tree , Painting

“For too long people have forgotten what a genius there is in the ordinary people of this country…the English stock is a true stock; and our people are the same people as those who built our cathedrals and our village churches: who carved the sculptures and who carved the screens inside them.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech upon receiving the Freedom of the City of Winchester (6 July 1928), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 115.
1928

People , Country

“Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any. Nothing is visible but the merest outline of dusky shapes. Standing within all is clear and denned; every ray of light reveals an army of unspeakable splendors.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 134.

Faith , Imagination , Light

“It is a pretty structure isn’t it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture that “beautiful” edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals of the arches of bridges.”

Primo Levi book The Periodic Table

On the structure of alloxan, in "Nitrogen".
The Periodic Table (1975)

Beauty , Thinking

“Here is laid the Body
of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Sacred Theology,
Dean of this Cathedral Church,
where fierce Indignation
can no longer
injure the Heart.
Go forth, Voyager,
and copy, if you can,
this vigorous (to the best of his ability)
Champion of Liberty.”
Hic depositum est Corpus IONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D. Hujus Ecclesiæ Cathedralis Decani, Ubi sæva Indignatio Ulterius Cor lacerare nequit, Abi Viator Et imitare, si poteris, Strenuum pro virili Libertatis Vindicatorem.

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Hic depositum est Corpus
IONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D.
Hujus Ecclesiæ Cathedralis
Decani,
Ubi sæva Indignatio
Ulterius
Cor lacerare nequit,
Abi Viator
Et imitare, si poteris,
Strenuum pro virili
Libertatis Vindicatorem.
Latin epitaph for himself (1740)
Variant translations:
Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his Breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-Besotted Traveler; he
Served human liberty.
W. B. Yeats, in The Winding Stair (1933)
Here is laid the body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, Dean of this Cathedral Church, where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart. Go, traveller, and imitate if you can one who strove with all his might to champion liberty.
As translated in John Mullan's review of Jonathan Swift by Victoria Glendinning, in London Review of Books, Vol. 20 No. 21 (29 October 1998)
Epitaph (1740)

Heart

“What wonderful things [Renoir is reacting on Corot's painting 'Interior of Chartres Cathedral' and Delacroix's 'Interior of M. de Mornay’s house', – he saw in 1919 from his wheelchair, in the reopened painting-rooms of the Louvre]. There isn’t a single big picture worth any more than these two little ones... The Director [of the Louvre] was so charming to me. I wish I could have thanked him properly. If you meet him, tell him how much I enjoyed my visit. If I'd presented myself at the Louvre in my wheelchair thirty years ago, they'd have shot me out fast enough! You see, one has to live a long time to see such changes. I've been one of the lucky ones.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

December 1919, Renoir died
late quote of Renoir, c. 1919, in Renoir – his life and work, Francois Fosca, Book Club Associates /Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1975, p. 237
after 1900

Change , Time , Painting , Housing

“I feel it, but I cannot express it,… I cannot analyse the Celtic genius to my own satisfaction. In the Middle Ages art came from groups, not from individuals. It was anonymous; the sculptors of cathedrals no more put their names to their works than our workmen put theirs on the pavement that they lay. Ah! what an admirable scorn of notoriety! The signature is what destroys us. We do portraits, but what we do is not so great. Thèse kings and queens, on the cathedrals, were not portraits. The fellow-workers stood for one another, and they interpreted; they did not copy. They made clothed figures; the nude and portraiture only date from the Renascence. And then those fellows cut with the tool's end into the block, that is why they were called sculptors. As for us, we are modellers. And what a disgraceful thing that casting from life is, which so many well-known sculptors do not blush to use! It is a mere swindling in art. Art was a vital function to the image-makers of the thirteenth century; they would hâve laughed at the idea of signing what they did, and never dreamed of honours and titles. When once their work was finished, they said no more about it, or else they talked among themselves. How curious it would hâve been to hear them, to be present at their gatherings, where they must hâve discussed in amusing phrases, and with simple, deep ideas!… Whenever the cathedrals disappear civilisation will go down one step. And even now we no longer understand them, we no longer know how to read their silent language. We need to make excavations not in the earth, but towards heaven…”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 63-64; About the genius of the Gothic sculptors.

Life , Age , Dreams , Art

“Great civilizations create great cathedrals, and the cathedrals of this generation should be in outer space. Cathedrals inspire rich and poor people alike to believe great things are possible. The Mars Polar Lander cost the average American the price of half a cheeseburger. A human lander would cost the average American more — perhaps even ten cheeseburgers! So be it. That is no great sacrifice.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2000s, 2000, A Truly Great America (2000)

People

“Legenda Aurea. To think that there's no Catholic edition of this most Catholic book!… Richard Benz sees it as epic and myth of the Middle Ages, exact parallel to the Gothic cathedrals. Sunk into oblivion with the epoch, rediscovered through the history of art, in the countless painters inspired by the Legend. Wonderful, costly and beautiful - but belonging utterly to the past, monument, museum: venerable, interesting, imposing - tout à fait passé.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59

Books , Age , Beauty , Art

“If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.”

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Faith , Religion , Music , Birth

“The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be nonbeing until the poet's struggle brings forth an answer — meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 4 : Creativity and the Encounter, p. 79

World , Reality , Time , Waiting

“When a man is actually with God, and then sees what he has tried to do and in our terms done so marvellously. it amounts to something which is utterly inadequate. That's what I'm saying: that the steeple reaching up so far, far away, that Salisbury Cathedral has a beautiful steeple, but what is it compared with the sky into which it is reaching? It is in this comparison that one is aware of on the one hand the absurdity of our efforts, and on the other the inadequacy of them”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

Interview with Bill Buckley

God , Beauty , Effort

“Let brothers and sisters from one end of the world, speak in all brotherly love, all affection, and one sweetness, to their brothers and sisters in the other extremity of the world. Then we shall succeed in rearing up one vast cathedral in this world, where men of all nations and races shall glorify the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.”

Keshub Chunder Sen (1838–1884) Indian academic

Sermon preached at Mill-hill Chapel, Leeds on 28th August 1870.

Love , Men , World , Sister

“Museums are my cathedrals. Artifacts in glass cases are my sacred relics. I truly believe I have felt something close to religious fervor inside some of these buildings. I even feel that I have experienced the occasional transcendent moment inside a museum.”

Guy P. Harrison book 50 reasons people give for believing in a god

50 reasons people give for believing in a god (2008)

Feeling

“Since then, much has changed. We do not care for Raphael, and are less enthusiastic about the statues of the so-called golden age of Greece. Our predecessors’ ideals are not ours. Works signed by great names over the centuries appeal to us less. In the hurry and bustle of their times, worldly-wise artists created works for Popes and palaces. It is the ordinary people who laboured in their workshops and of whose lives scarcely anything is now known, whose very names have not come down to us, that we love and respect today in their plain, large-scale carvings in the cathedrals of Naumburg, Magdeburg and Bamberg.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

2.
1900 - 1920, On Primitive Art – Emil Nolde, 1912

Love , People , Age , Change

“In contrast to the old monumental art [the book] itself goes to the people, and does not stand like a cathedral in one place waiting for someone to approach…. [The book is the] monument of the future.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

c. 1930
Wikipedia: El Lissitzky, note [2]
1926 - 1941

People , Books , Art , Waiting

“The fire put an end to the typically bustling business activities in downtown Beijing. But its psychological impact was much stronger than the financial losses. It left the Beijing residents in a constant state of terror and fear…Most missionary properties, residences of the foreign teachers at the Imperial University and the Eastern and the Southern Cathedrals were reduced to aches. Many Chinese priests and christian converts perished together in the roaring flames.”

Xiang Lanxin (1956)

The Origins of the Boxer War: A Multinational Study (作者)) http://books.google.com/books?id=lAxresT12ogC&dq=yangcun+dong+fuxiang&q=sheng+jia#v=onepage&q=magic%20power%20may%20, page 275.

Fear , Business , Teachers , Universe

“The sculptors of the cathedral porches of the Middle Ages already knew that we can identify many legendary figures by their attributes, not their physical appearance. How is one to recognize Orpheus without his lyre, or Saint Lawrence without his grid? At the same time it seems a bit absurd, In an art that claims to be realistic, to have Orpheus always carrying his lyre, like a German businessman his briefcase. There must have been moments when Orpheus and Saint Lawrence left their lyre or their grid at the checkroom, for instance.. [c. 1960, in France]”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

Source: 1960 - 1968, Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, p. 153

Age , Art , Appearance , Time

“In all the Romish [Catholic] countries of Europe, France, Italy, Germany, etc., the God Christ, as well as his mother, are described in their old pictures and statues to be black. The infant God in the arms of his black mother, his eyes and drapery white, is himself perfectly black. If the reader doubts my word he may go to the Cathedral at Moulins—to the famous Chapel of the Virgin at Loretto—to the Church of the Annunciata—the Church at St. Lazaro or the Church of St. Stephen at Genoa—to St. Francisco at Pisa—to the Church at Brixen in Tyrol and to that at Padua—to the Church of St. Theodore at Munich—to a church and to the Cathedral at Augsburg, where a black virgin and child as large as life—to Rome and the Borghese chapel of Maria Maggiore—to the Pantheon—to a small chapel of St. Peters on the right hand side on entering, near the door; and in fact, to almost innumerable other churches in countries professing the Romish religion.”

Godfrey Higgins book Anacalypsis

Vol. I., p. 138.
Anacalypsis (published 1833)

Life , God , Religion , Christ

“Now let us consider how many relics of the true cross there are in the world. An account of those merely with which I am acquainted would fill a whole volume, for there is not a church, from a cathedral to the most miserable abbey or parish church, that does not contain a piece. Large splinters of it are preserved in various places, as for instance in the Holy Chapel at Paris, whilst at Rome they show a crucifix of considerable size made entirely, they say, from this wood. In short, if we were to collect all these pieces of the true cross exhibited in various parts, they would form a whole ship's cargo. The Gospel testifies that the cross could be borne by one single individual;..”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Traité des reliques http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32136/32136-h/32136-h.html, translators: Krasinski, Valerian, Count, approximately 1780-1855. P. 233.

World , Parting

“From the top of the campanile, or Giotto's bell tower, in Florence, one can look out over the city in all directions, past the stone banking houses where the rich Medici lived, past the art galleries they patronized, past the magnificent cathedral and churches their money helped to build, and on to the Tuscan vineyards where the contadino works the soil as hard and efficiently as he probably ever did. The city below is busy with life. The university halls, the shops, the restaurants are crowded. The sound of Vespas, the "wasps" of the machine age, fills the air, but Florence is not today what it once was, the center in the 15th century of a great civilization, one of the most extraordinary the world has ever known. Why? What produced the Renaissance in Italy, of which Florence was the center? How did it happen that such a small population base could produce, in the short span of a few generations, great historical figures first in commerce and literature, then in architecture, sculpture and painting, and finally in science and music? Why subsequently did Northern Italy decline in importance both commercially and artistically until at the present time it is not particularly distinguished as compared with many other regions of the world? Certainly the people appear to be working as hard and energetically as ever. Was it just luck or a peculiar combination of circumstances? Historians have been fascinated by such questions ever since they began writing history, because the rise and fall of Florence or the whole of Northern Italy is by no means an isolated phenomenon.”

David C. McClelland (1917–1998) American psychological theorist

Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. 1; lead paragraph, about the problem

Life , Money , People , Age

“Before I came, I went to visit Jane Austen's grave in Winchester Cathedral to pay my respects, you know, and tell her about the grosses. [Laughter] I don't know how she would react to an evening like this, but I do hope -- I do hope she knows how big she is in Uruguay.”

Emma Thompson (1959) British actress and writer

68th Academy Awards speech (1996)

Hope , Laughter

“Dodgson was overcome by the beauty of Cologne Cathedral. I found him leaning against the rails of the Choir and sobbing like a child. When the verger came to show us over the chapels behind the Choir, he got out of the way, he said that he could not bear the harsh voice of the man in the presence of so much beauty.”

Henry Liddon (1829–1890) British theologian

The Russian Journal, ed. Morton Cohen (1979), p. 13.

Beauty , Way

“The years of old age are stalls in the cathedral of life in which for aged men to sit and listen and meditate and be patient till the service is over, and in which they may get themselves ready to say "Amen" at the last, with all their hearts and souls and strength.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 439.

Life , Men , Age , Soul

“These bygone workmen did not serve, they worked. They had an absolute honor, which is honor proper. A chair rung had to be well made. That was an understood thing. That was the first thing. It wasn’t that the chair rung had to be well made for the salary or on account of the salary. It wasn’t that it was well made for the boss, nor for connoisseurs, nor for the boss’ clients. It had to be well made itself, in itself, for itself, in its very self. A tradition coming, springing from deep within the race, a history, an absolute, an honor, demanded that this chair rung be well made. Every part of the chair which could not be seen was just as perfectly made as the parts which could be seen. This was the selfsame principle of cathedrals. … There was no question of being seen or of not being seen. It was the innate being of work which needed to be well done.”

Charles Péguy (1873–1914) French poet, essayist, and editor

Source: Basic Verities, Prose and Poetry (1943), p. 82

History , Spring , Question , Parting

“Freud spoke of oceanic consciousness as that in which we feel our individual existence lost in mystic union with the universe. Nothing could be more appropriate to contemporary experience, when for the first time man has left the boundaries of this globe. The oceanic effect of synaesthetic cinema is similar to the mystical allure of the natural elements: we stare in mindless wonder at the ocean or a lake or river. We are drawn almost hypnotically to fire, gazing as though spellbound. We see cathedrals in clouds, not thinking anything in particular but feeling somehow secure and content. It is similar to the concept of no-mindedness in Zen, which also is the state of mantra and mandala consciousness, the widest range of consciousness.”

Gene Youngblood book Expanded Cinema

Source: Expanded Cinema, 1970, p. 92, as cited in: " Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood, Studio Vista, 1970 http://www.hohlwelt.com/en/books/gyngbld.html" at hohlwelt.com, January 21, 2012

Feeling , Nature , Thinking , Universe

“"Another situation generally exposed to ressentiment danger is the older generation's relation with the younger. The process of aging can only be fruitful and satisfactory if the important transitions are accompanied by free resignation, by the renunciation of the values proper to the preceding stage of life. Those spiritual and intellectual values which remain untouched by the process of aging, together with the values of the next stage of life, must compensate for what has been lost. Only if this happens can we cheerfully relive the values of our past in memory, without envy for the young to whom they are still accessible. If we cannot compensate, we avoid and flee the “tormenting” recollection of youth, thus blocking our possibilities of understanding younger people. At the same time we tend to negate the specific values of earlier stages. No wonder that youth always has a hard fight to sustain against the ressentiment of the older generation. Yet this source of ressentiment is also subject to an important historical variation. In the earliest stages of civilization, old age as such is so highly honored and respected for its experience that ressentiment has hardly any chance to develop. But education spreads through printing and other modern media and increasingly replaces the advantage of experience. Younger people displace the old from their positions and professions and push them into the defensive. As the pace of “progress” increases in all fields, and as the changes of fashion tend to affect even the higher domains (such as art and science), the old can no longer keep up with their juniors. “Novelty‟ becomes an ever greater value. This is doubly true when the generation as such is seized by an intense lust for life, and when the generations compete with each other instead of cooperating for the creation of works which outlast them. “Every cathedral,” Werner Sombart writes, “every monastery, every town hall, every castle of the Middle Ages bears testimony to the transcendence of the individual's span of life: its completion spans generations which thought that they lived for ever. Only when the individual cut himself loose from the community which outlasted him, did the duration of his personal life become his standard of happiness.” Therefore buildings are constructed ever more hastily—Sombart cites a number of examples. A corresponding phenomenon is the ever more rapid alternation of political regimes which goes hand in hand with the progression of the democratic movement. But every change of government, every parliamentary change of party domination leaves a remnant of absolute opposition against the values of the new ruling group. This opposition is spent in ressentiment the more the losing group feels unable to return to power. The “retired official” with his followers is a typical ressentiment figure. Even a man like Bismarck did not entirely escape from this danger."”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Life , People , Youth , Age