Quotes about shrine (98 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The rich
Will make temples for Siva
what shall I, a poor man, do?
My legs are pillars,
the body the shrine,
the head the cupola of gold,
Listen, O! Lord:
Standing things shall fall,
that which moves shall stay”

Basava (1134–1196) a 12th-century Hindu philosopher, statesman, Kannada Bhakti poet of Lingayatism

[Chekki, Danesh A., Religion and Social System of the Vīraśaiva Community, http://books.google.com/books?id=x7JZMy1qntgC&pg=PA48, 1 January 1997, Greenwood Publishing Group, 978-0-313-30251-0, 48–]

“Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist and stage and film actor

"Shrine or Factory?" (1918); translation from Mikhail Anikst et al. (eds.) Soviet Commercial Design of the Twenties (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987) p. 15

Art , Home , Dead

“From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad.”

Ivo Andrič (1892–1975) novelist, short story writer

The Bridges, as quoted in The Old Bridge of Mostar and Increasing Respect for Cultural Property in Armed Conflict (2012) by Jadranka Petrovic, p. 65

Secret , Sense , Housing

“From the far reaches of the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River, the faithful approached the city of Mecca. All had the same objective to worship together at the most sacred shrine of Islam, the Kaaba in Mecca. One such traveler was Mansa Musa, Sultan of Mali in Western Africa. Mansa Musa had prepared carefully for the long journey he and his attendants would take. He was determined to travel not only for his own religious fulfillment, but also for recruiting teachers and leaders, so that his realms could learn more of the Prophet's teachings.”

Musa I of Mali (1280–1337) emperor of the Mali Empire

Chronicle of the Seeker by: Mahmud Kati

Faith , Travel , Learning , Teachers

“We search for our shrine so we can joyfully gaze upon it. Sadly, when we arrive at the solemn place, there is nothing to see.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1987

Search

“The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

World , Travel

“Joy, thou spark from Heav'n immortal,
Daughter of Elysium!
Drunk with fire, toward Heaven advancing
Goddess, to thy shrine we come.
Thy sweet magic brings together
What stern Custom spreads afar;
All men become brothers
Where thy happy wing-beats are.”

Friedrich Schiller Ode to Joy

Stanza 1
An die Freude (Ode to Joy; or Hymn to Joy) (1785)

Men , Joy , Daughters , Happiness

“While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over.”

V.S. Naipaul book India: A Wounded Civilization

India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)

“In shrines dwell robbers,
in idol-houses, thugs.
In mosques live vagabonds,
the lovers of God remaind aloof.”

Bulleh Shah (1680–1757) Punjabi poet

Bulleh Shah, The Love-Intoxicated Iconoclast, p. 136
Couplets

God , Housing , Lovers

“Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but the endless, tameless pilgrimage of hearts.”

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

"The Holy Dimension", p. 332
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Faith , Heart

“Those are shrines. Some people believe spirits live in them.”

Hayao Miyazaki (1941) Japanese animator, film director, and mangaka

Source: Spirited Away, Volume 1

People

“The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“Like proselytization, desecrating and demolishing the temples of non-Muslims is also central to Islam…. India too suffered terribly as thousands of Hindu temples and sacred edifices disappeared in northern India by the time of Sikandar Lodi and Babur. Will Durant rightly laments in the Story of Civilization that "We can never know from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty it once possessed". In Delhi, after the demolition of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, the materials of which were utilized to construct the Quwwat-ul-Islam masjid, it was after 700 years that the Birla Mandir could be constructed in 1930s. Sita Ram Goel has brought out two excellent volumes on Hindu Temples: What happened to them. These informative volumes give a list of Hindu shrines and their history of destruction in the medieval period on the basis of Muslim evidence itself. This of course does not cover all the shrines razed. Muslims broke temples recklessly. Those held in special veneration by Hindus like the ones at Somnath, Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, were special targets of Muslims, and whenever the Hindus could manage to rebuild their shrines at these places, they were again destroyed by Muslim rulers. From the time of Mahmud of Ghazni who destroyed the temples at Somnath and Mathura to Babur who struck at Ayodhya to Aurangzeb who razed the temples at Kashi Mathura and Somnath, the story is repeated again and again.”

K. S. Lal book Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India

Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999)

Beauty , History , Suffering , Time

“Whilst America hath been the land of promise to Europeans, and their descendants, it hath been the vale of death to millions of the wretched sons of Africa… Whilst we were offering up vows at the shrine of Liberty… whilst we swore irreconcilable hostility to her enemies… whilst we adjured the God of Hosts to witness our resolution to live free or die… we were imposing on our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained.”

St. George Tucker (1752–1827) Bermudan lawyer and judge

A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it, in the State of Virginia (1796)

Death , Men , God , Hostility

““…Mas‘ud hunted through the country around Bahraich, and whenever he passed by the idol temple of Suraj-kund, he was wont to say that he wanted that piece of ground for a dwelling-place. This Suraj-kund was a sacred shrine of all the unbelievers of India. They had carved an image of the sun in stone on the banks of the tank there. This image they called Balarukh, and through its fame Bahraich had attained its flourishing condition. When there was an eclipse of the sun, the unbelievers would come from east and west to worship it, and every Sunday the heathen of Bahraich and its environs, male and female, used to assemble in thousands to rub their heads under that stone, and do it reverence as an object of peculiar sanctity. Mas‘ud was distressed at this idolatry, and often said that, with God’s will and assistance, he would destroy that mine of unbelief, and set up a chamber for the worship of the Nourisher of the Universe in its place, rooting out unbelief from those parts…
“Meanwhile, the Rai Sahar Deo and Har Deo, with several other chiefs, who had kept their troops in reserve, seeing that the army of Islam was reduced to nothing, unitedly attacked the body-guard of the Prince. The few forces that remained to that loved one of the Lord of the Universe were ranged round him in the garden. The unbelievers, surrounding them in dense numbers, showered arrows upon them. It was then, on Sunday, the 14th of the month Rajab, in the aforesaid year 424 (14th June, 1033) as the time of evening prayer came on, that a chance arrow pierced the main artery in the arm of the Prince of the Faithful…”

Ghazi Saiyyad Salar Masud (1014) semi-legendary Muslim figure from India

Awadh (Uttar Pradesh), Mir‘at-i-Mas‘udi in Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own historians, Vol. II. p. 524-547

Love , God , Faith , Universe

“…The nobles and chiefs said, ‘It seems expedient that the victorious standards should move towards the Dekhin’…Sher Shah replied: ‘What you have said is most right and proper, but it has come into my mind that since the time of Sultan Ibrahim, the infidel zamindars have rendered the country of Islam full of unbelievers, and having thrown down masjids and buildings of the believers, placed idol-shrines in them, and they are in possession of the country of Delhi and Malwa. Until I have cleansed the country from the existing contamination of the unbelievers, I will not go into any other country’…”

Sher Shah Suri (1486–1545) founder of Sur Empire in Northern India

Sher Shah Sur (AD 1538-1545) Tarikh-i-Sher Shahi in Eliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Vol. IV, pp. 403-04.

Time , Victory , Country

“We meet to celebrate the birthday of America. The coming of a new life always excites our interest. Although we know in the case of the individual that it has been an infinite repetition reaching back beyond our vision, that only makes it the more wonderful. But how our interest and wonder increase when we behold the miracle of the birth of a new nation. It is to pay our tribute of reverence and respect to those who participated in such a mighty event that we annually observe the fourth day of July. Whatever may have been the impression created by the news which went out from this city on that summer day in 1776, there can be no doubt as to the estimate which is now placed upon it. At the end of 150 years the four corners of the earth unite in coming to Philadelphia as to a holy shrine in grateful acknowledgement of a service so great, which a few inspired men here rendered to humanity, that it is still the preeminent support of free government throughout the world.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

Life , Men , World , Birthday

“The next monument visited was the great Jain temple built only a few years before by Shantidas Jhaveri, one of the wealthiest men of Gujarat in his day and high in favour both with Shah Jahan and after him with Aurangzeb. …In 1638, however, when Mandelslo visited the place, this temple which he calls ‘ the principal mosque of the Banyas ’ was in all its pristine splendour and ‘ without dispute one of the noblest structures that could be seen’. ‘It was then new,’ he adds, ‘ for the Founder, who was a rich Banya merchant, named Shantidas, was living in my time.
As Mandelslo’s description is the earliest account we have of this famous monument, which was desecrated only seven years after visit by the Orders of Aurangzeb, then viceroy of Gujarat (1645), we shall reproduce it at some length. It stood in the middle of a great court which was enclosed by a high wall of freestone. All about this wall on the inner side was a gallery, similar to the cloisters of the monasteries in Europe, with a large number of cells, in each of which was placed a statue in white or black marble. These figures no doubt represented the Jain Tirthankars, but Mandelslo may be forgiven when he speaks of each of them as ‘ representing a woman naked, sitting, and having her legs lying cross under her, according to the mode of the country. Some of the cells had three statues in them, namely, a large one between two smaller ones.’ At the entrance to the temple stood two elephants of black marble in life- size and on one of them was seated an effigy of the builder. The walls of the temple were adorned with figures of men and animals. At the further end of the building were the shrines consisting of three chapels divided from each other by wooden rails. In these were placed marble statues of the Tirthankars with a lighted lamp before that which stood in the central shrine. One of the priests attending the temple was busy receiving from the votaries flowers which were placed round the images, as also oil for the lamps that hung before the rails, and wheat and salt as a sacrifice. The priest had covered his mouth and nose with a piece of linen cloth so that the impurity of his breath should not profane the images.”

Shantidas Jhaveri (1580–1659) Indian jewellery and bullion trader during Mughal era

Description of the temple built by Shantidas Jhaveri. Mandelslo’s Travels In Western India (a.d.1638-9) https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.531053 p. 23-25

Life , Men , Flowers , Lying

“It is simply not true that capitalism as a historical system has represented progress over the various previous historical systems that it destroyed or transformed. Even as I write this, I feel the tremour that accompanies the sense of blasphemy. I fear the wrath of the gods, for I have been moulded in the same ideological forge as all my compeers and have worshipped at the same shrines.”

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019) economic historian

Wallerstein (1995) Historical Capitalism, with Capitalist Civilization. London: Verso. p. 98.

God , Fear , Feeling , Sense

“…From Mundulgur Moozuffur Khan marched to Ajmeer, to pay his devotions at the shrine of Khwaja Moyin-ood-Deen Hussun Sunjury, from the whence he went towards Guzerat. On reaching Julwara, he destroyed the temples; and after exacting heavy contributions, and establishing his authority, he returned to Puttun…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Muzaffar Shãh I of Gujarat (AD 1392-1410) Jhalawar (Rajasthan)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

“The oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.”

John Milton On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

Hymn, stanza 19, line 173
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629)

“So that, in the Islamic state, Delhi was not the capital of the empire; it was Quwwat-ul-Islam. The king was not the ruler of the people; he was Amir-ul-Mauminin, “the conqueror of infidels and shelterer of Islam.” The army was not the royal army; it was Lashkar-i-Islam. The soldier was not a cavalry man or infantry man; he was Ahl-i-Jihad. The law of the state was not any secular or humanitarian law; it was Shariat, the law of Islam. The state was not an end in itself, like the Greek state, but a means of sub-serving the interests of Islam. Conquests were made, shrines were broken, captives were taken, converts were made - all in the name of Islam. The raison d’etre of the regime was to disseminate the Islamic faith.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 4

People , Faith , Law

“God walked alone unhonored through the earth;
For Him no heart-built temple open stood,
The soul forgetful of her nobler birth
Had hewn him lofty shrines of stone and wood,
And left unfinished and in ruins still
The only temple he delights to fill.”

Jones Very (1813–1880) American poet and essayist

From Enoch

God , Soul , Birth , Heart

“The climax was reached when the same Marxist professors started explaining away Islamic iconoclasm in terms of what they described as Hindu destruction of Buddhist and Jain places of worship. They have never been able to cite more than half-a-dozen cases of doubtful veracity. A few passages in Sanskrit literature coupled with speculations about some archaeological sites have sufficed for floating the story, sold ad nauseam in the popular press, that Hindus destroyed Buddhist and Jain temples on a large scale. Half-a-dozen have become thousands and then hundreds of thousands in the frenzied imagination suffering from a deep-seated anti-Hindu animus…. And these “facts” have been presented with a large dose of suppressio veri suggestio falsi…. A very late Buddhist book from Sri Lanka accuses Pushyamitra Sunga, a second century B. C. king, of offering prizes to those who brought to him heads of Buddhist monks. This single reference has sufficed for presenting Pushyamitra as the harbinger of a “Brahmanical reaction” which “culminated in the age of the Guptas.” The fact that the famous Buddhist stupas and monasteries at Bharhut and Sanchi were built and thrived under the very nose of Pushyamitra is never mentioned. Nor is the fact that the Gupta kings and queens built and endowed many Buddhist monasteries at Bodh Gaya, Nalanda and Sarnath among many other places. (…) This placing of Hindu kings on par with Muslim invaders in the context of iconoclasm suffers from serious shortcomings. Firstly, it lacks all sense of proportion when it tries to explain away the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain temples by Islamic invaders in terms of the doubtful destruction of a few Buddhist and Jain shrines by Hindu kings. Secondly, it has yet to produce evidence that Hindus ever had a theology of iconoclasm which made this practice a permanent part of Hinduism. Isolated acts by a few fanatics whom no Hindu historian or pandit has ever admired, cannot explain away a full-fledged theology which inspired Islamic iconoclasm….”

Pushyamitra Shunga King of Sunga Dynasty

S.R. Goel, Some Historical Questions (Indian Express, April 16, 1989), quoted in Shourie, A., & Goel, S. R. (1990). Hindu temples: What happened to them.

Books , Age , Imagination , Literature

“We two will stand beside that shrine,
Occult, withheld, untrod,
Whose lamps are stirr'd continually
With prayer sent up to God;
And see our old prayers, granted, melt
Each like a little cloud.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) English poet, illustrator, painter and translator

The Blessed Damozel http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/715.html (1850)

God

“Nowadays everyone lives selfishly and seeks only the leisure in which to indulge his own desires. They look on all the beauties of nature-the rivers and mountains, the breeze and the moon-as their own to enjoy, forgetting what the shrine of the Sun Goddess stands for. The common man thinks of his life as his own and refuses to perform his duty to his lord. The samurai regards his household as his own private possession and refuses to sacrifice his life for his state. The feudal lords regard their domains as their own and refuse to serve King and Country. Unwilling to serve King and Country, at home they cherish only the objects of desire and abroad they willingly yield to the foreign barbarian, inviting defeat and destruction. Thus the scenic beauties they enjoy will not long remain in their possession.”

Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) Japanese politician

Vol. IV.
Yoshida Shoin Zenshu

Life , Beauty , Home , Mountain

“It's not necessary to be born again. You have your way to God, I have mine. I found eternal peace in a Shinto shrine … I've been to Shinto shrines and God is everywhere. … Christ is one of the ways! God is everywhere.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

On a Phil Donahue Show in 1984, as quoted in The Sword of the Lord (14 December 1984)

God , Peace , Way , Christ

“What need hath she
Of shrine to her divinity?
Each fair face is her visible shrine;
She hath been, she will be divine.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Golden Violet - The Queen of Cyprus
The Golden Violet (1827)

“The shrine is vowed to freedom, but, my friend,
Freedom is but a means to gain an end.
Freedom should build the temple, but the shrine
Be consecrate to thought still more divine.
The human bliss which angel hopes foresaw
Is liberty to comprehend the law.
Give, then, thy book a larger scope and frame,
Comprising means and end in Truth's great name.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Freedom and Truth

Truth , Books , Law , Hope

“There is no. man, there is no people, without a God. That God may be a visible idol, carved of wood or stone, to which sacrifice is offered in the forest, in the temple, or in the market-place; or it may be an invisible idol, fashioned in a man's own image and worshipped ardently at his own personal shrine. Somewhere in the universe there is that in which each individual has firm faith, and on which he places steady reliance. The fool who says in his heart "There is no God" really means there is no God but himself. His supreme egotism, his colossal vanity, have placed him at the center of the universe which is thereafter to be measured and dealt with in terms of his personal satisfactions. So it has come to pass that after nearly two thousand years much of the world resembles the Athens of St. Paul's time, in that it is wholly given to idolatry; but in the modern case there are as many idols as idol worshippers, and every such idol worshipper finds his idol in the looking-glass. The time has come once again to repeat and to expound in thunderous tones the noble sermon of St. Paul on Mars Hill, and to declare to these modern idolaters "Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you."
There can be no cure for the world's ills and no abatement of the world's discontents until faith and the rule of everlasting principle are again restored and made supreme in the life of men and of nations. These millions of man-made gods, these myriads of personal idols, must be broken up and destroyed, and the heart and mind of man brought back to a comprehension of the real meaning of faith and its place in life. This cannot be done by exhortation or by preaching alone. It must be done also by teaching; careful, systematic, rational teaching, that will show in a simple language which the uninstructed can understand what are the essentials of a permanent and lofty morality, of a stable and just social order, and of a secure and sublime religious faith.
Here we come upon the whole great problem of national education, its successes and its disappointments, its achievements and its problems yet unsolved. Education is not merely instruction far from it. It is the leading of the youth out into a comprehension of his environment, that, comprehending, he may so act and so conduct himself as to leave the world better and happier for his having lived in it. This environment is not by any means a material thing alone. It is material of course, but, in addition, it is intellectual, it is spiritual. The youth who is led to an understanding of nature and of economics and left blind and deaf to the appeals of literature, of art, of morals and of religion, has been shown but a part of that great environment which is his inheritance as a human being. The school and the college do much, but the school and the college cannot do all. Since Protestantism broke up the solidarity of the ecclesiastical organization in the western world, and since democracy made intermingling of state and church impossible, it has been necessary, if religion is to be saved for men, that the family and the church do their vital cooperative part in a national organization of educational effort. The school, the family and the church are three cooperating educational agencies, each of which has its weight of responsibility to bear. If the family be weakened in respect of its moral and spiritual basis, or if the church be neglectful of its obligation to offer systematic, continuous and convincing religious instruction to the young who are within its sphere of influence, there can be no hope for a Christian education or for the powerful perpetuation of the Christian faith in the minds and lives of the next generation and those immediately to follow. We are trustees of a great inheritance. If we abuse or neglect that trust we are responsible before Almighty God for the infinite damage that will be done in the life of individuals and of nations…. Clear thinking will distinguish between men's different associations, and it will be able to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and to render unto God the things which are God's.”

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

Making liberal men and women : public criticism of present-day education, the new paganism, the university, politics and religion https://archive.org/stream/makingliberalmen00butluoft/makingliberalmen00butluoft_djvu.txt (1921)

Life , Men , God , People

“There is a kind of laughter that sickens the soul. Laughter when it is out of control: when it screams and stamps its feet, and sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter in all its ignorance and cruelty. Laughter with the seed of Satan in it. It tramples upon shrines; the belly-roarer. It roars, it yells, it is delirious: and yet it is as cold as ice. It has no humour. It is naked noise and naked malice.”

Mervyn Peake book Boy in Darkness

"Boy in Darkness," Sometime, Never (1956)

Soul , Laughter

“Age cannot Love destroy,
But perfidy can blast the flower,
Even when in most unwary hour
It blooms in Fancy’s bower.
Age cannot Love destroy,
But perfidy can rend the shrine
In which its vermeil splendours shine.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Untitled (1810); titled "Love's Rose" by William Michael Rossetti in Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1870)

Love , Age , Flowers

“We are taunted—by the French, by the Italians, by the Spaniards—for refusing to worship at the shrine of a common government superimposed upon them all… where were the European unity merchants in 1940? I will tell you. They were either writhing under a hideous oppression or they were aiding and abetting that oppression. Lucky for Europe that Britain was alone in 1940.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Merseyside Conservative Ladies' Luncheon Club (5 January 1990), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 928
1990s

“What sought they thus afar?
Bright jewels of the mine,
The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?
They sought a faith's pure shrine.”

Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) English poet

Stanza 9.
The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers http://www.poetry-archive.com/h/landing_of_the_pilgrim_fathers.html (1826)

War , Faith , Sea , Wealth

“Such graves as his are pilgrim shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined,—
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind.”

Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867) American writer

Burns.

“When did he cross that line from a person to a textile shrine?”

Ralston Bowles (1952) American musician

From the song "Velvet Elvis" on the album The Grand Rapids Collection (2005)

Personality

“If you want to know what Churches were made for, come down here on some great festival of the Virgin; but come alone! That kind of knowledge cannot be taught and can seldom be shared. We are not now seeking religion; indeed, true religion generally comes unsought. We are trying only to feel gothic art. For us the world is not a schoolroom or a pulpit, but a stage, and the stage is the highest yet seen on earth. In this church the old romanesque leaps into the gothic under our eyes; of a sudden, between the portal and the shrine, the infinite rises into a new expression, always a rare and excellent miracle in thought.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

World , Religion , Art , Feeling

“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

“Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have fallen out of fashion: everybody worships at the shrine of commerce.”

Charles Fourier (1772–1837) French utopian socialist and philosopher

The Theory of the Four Movements (1808), G. Jones, ed. (1966), p. 269

Wisdom , Fashion

“It cannot be maintained that Islam did not provide an ample opportunity to Hindu saints, philosophers and princes to understand its true character and role. Before the armies of Islam invaded India, the sufis had settled down in many parts of India, built mosque and khanqahs and started their work of conversion. They were the sappers and miners of Islamic invasions which followed in due course. Moinuddin Chishti was not the first 'saint' of Islam to send out an invitation to an Islamic invader to come and kill the kafirs, desecrate their shrines, and plunder their wealth.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

Understanding , Parting , Wealth

“All these relics gave… Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine to memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old-English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings, — all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.”

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 11)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Home , Flowers , Bird , Memory

“And shall they rise, all these? Will there be a trumpet blast so shrill that none of them may refuse to hear it, and the soul, re-entering its shrine of eminent or common clay, pass upward to the judgment? "Many and mighty, but all hushed," shall they submit with us to the judgment of the last assize? And in that world is it true that gold is not the currency, and that rank is not hereditary, and that there is only one name that is honored? Then, if this is the end of all men, let the living lay it to heart. Solemn and thoughtful, let us search for an assured refuge; childlike and earnest, let us conf1de in the one accepted Name; let us realize the tender and infinite nearness of God our Father, through Jesus our Surety and our Friend.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 519.

Men , God , World , Soul

“She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”

John Keats Ode on Melancholy

"Ode on Melancholy", st. 3
Poems (1820)

Pleasure , Sadness , Beauty , Soul

“But a meek humble Man of modest Sense,
Who, Preaching Peace, does practice Continence;
Whose pious life’s a proof he does believe,
Mysterious Truths, which no Man can conceive.
If upon Earth there dwell such God-like Men,
I'll here Recant my Paradox to them;
Adore those Shrines of Virtue, homage pay,
And, with the rabble world, their Laws obey.
If such there are, yet grant me This at least,
Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast.”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

ll. 212-221
A Satire Against Mankind (1679)

Life , Men , God , Truth

“"The door is locked, Captain." "Then I'll break it down." "It is a shrine." "Then I'll say a prayer of forgiveness after I've knocked it down."”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Major Pedro Ferreira and Captain Richard Sharpe, p. 13
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Escape (2003)

Forgiveness

“The story of Islam is no different. Prophetic Islam is inimical to mystic ideas. In the beginning, some Sufis courted martyrdom, but eventually they bought peace and safety by surrendering to Prophetic Islam. There have been some outstanding Sufis, but by arid large the Sufi movement has been part of a larger aggressive apparatus, just like Christian Missions of Imperialism. Though Islam persecuted "infidels", destroyed their temples, enslaved and looted them, we find no Sufis protesting. In fact. they were often beneficiaries of this vandalism. "In many cases there is no doubt that the shrine of a ·Muslim saint marks the site of some local cult which was practised on the spot long before the introduction of Islam," says Thomas Arnold making it look quite normal and harmless. Mu'in aI-Din Chishtl's dargah at Ajmer is one such shrine built on the ruins of an old Hindu temple. The saint had also got the present of a Hindu princess, part of thebooty captured by a Muslim General, Malik Khitab, when he attacked the neighbouring pagan land. Sufi saints often took full part in Islamic jihad.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

Peace , Idea , Parting , Princess

“Thrice hallowed shrine
Of the heart's intercourse, our own fireside!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Gladesmuir from The London Literary Gazette (14th September 1822) Poetical Sketches. Third series - Sketch the Second
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Heart

“The fact that this enterprise is being begun in one of our new states not yet great in population, not largely developed in its resources, discloses that the old American spirit still goes where our people go, still dominates their lives, still inspires them to deeds of devotion and sacrifice. It is but another illustration of the determination of our people to use their material resources to minister to their spiritual life. This memorial will be another national shrine to which future generations will repair to declare their continuing allegiance to independence, to self-government, to freedom and to economic justice. It is an inspiring phase of American life that men are willing to devote their energies to the erection of a memorial of this nature. Money spent for such a purpose is certain of adequate returns in the nature of increased public welfare.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Address at the Black Hills (1927)

Life , Men , Money , People

“[In many cases] there is no doubt that the shrine of a Muslim saint marks the site of some local cult which was practised on the spot long before the introduction of Islam.”

Thomas Arnold (1795–1842) English headmaster of Rugby School

Quoted in P.M. Currie, The Shrine and Cult of Mu‘in al-Dîn Chishtî of Ajmer, OUP, 1989 p. 74-87 and quoted in Ram Swarup, Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

“We went to Kyoto -- back to Japan -- to work in the Matsuo Tiasha shrine which Sei Shonagon had visited regularly. I couldn't give up such an opportunity. I was also a little homesick. We didn't finish walking the cat-walk until midnight when all the audience had gone. I didn't mind -- Sei Shonagon had watched the moon rise in that garden a thousand years ago -- I could have walked up and down that path all night long.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Nagiko's journal for Nov 9 1997
The Pillow Book

Cats , Night

“We weep before the Blessed Mother's shrine,
To think upon her sorrows, but her joys
What nun could ever know a tithing of?
The precious hours she watched above His sleep
Were worth the fearful anguish of the end.
Yea, lack of love is bitterest of all.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Marianna Alcoforando"
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)

Love , Fear , Thinking , Sleep

“Voluptuous habits speedily bind all the powers of the soul in loathsome vassalage, and exclude every thought except such as relate to the beastly pleasures of which it is the slave. Distracted by cravings as inexorable as they are base, and in their vileness perpetually reproduced, — tantalized by the impure fountains of a diseased imagination, and oppressed with its own effeminacy, — the mind loses its vigor and its productiveness. Every faculty rapidly deteriorates and decays; memory becomes extinguished, inanity destroys resolution, and the heart is as cold and callous as a cinder extinct. It ceases to love, to sympathize, and diffuse the delicious tears that sanctify friendship's shrine. The whole countenance assumes an expression of obdurateness and repugnance. The features, marked with premature decay, proclaim that the source of gentle sentiments, pure emotions, and innocent joys, is exhausted, like a limpid fountain invaded by the scoria and flame of a volcano. All the elements of life seem to have retreated into their abused organs only to perish there. Even the organs themselves are withered, and worse than dead; their infirmities, maladies, sufferings, rush in a multitude upon the degraded victim, and overwhelm him in awful retribution.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 354.

Love , Life , Friendship , Pleasure

“For different reasons, and also out of apprehension, people visit in large numbers (the mazars or shrines) of Shah Madar, Khwaja Muin-ud-din, Salar, Sarur Sultan and Pir Ganun (Pir Pabu?) etc. They go for ziyarat (visit to sacred tombs) and perform tawaf (circumbulation) which are bid‘at. Orders were issued to stop these practices…Also, the Hindus, and quite often the Musalmans also, flock at (the shrines of) Devi for worship and that of Pir Pabu. The Emperor ordered that this should be stopped. It was also ordered that the Hindus must not crowd at these places, and worship of Shitla wherever it is performed, should be held at a distance (from the habitation).”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Siyaha Waqai Darbar, Julus (R.Yr.) 10, Rabi II, 17 / 26th September 1667.
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1660s

People

“Allah, who is the only true God and has no other emanation, endowed the king of Islam with the strength to destroy this ancient shrine on the eastern sea-coast and to plunge it into the sea, and after its destruction, he ordered the nose of the image of Jagannath to be perforated and disgraced it by casting it down on the ground. They dug out other idols, which were worshipped by the polytheists in the kingdom of Jajnagar, and overthrew them as they did the image of Jagannath, for being laid in front of the mosques along the path of the Sunnis and way of the musallis (the multitude who offer prayers) and stretched them in front of the portals of every mosque, so that the body and sides of the images may be trampled at the time of ascent and descent, entrance and exit, by the shoes on the feet of the Muslims.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Puri (Orissa). Sirat-Firuz Shahi, quoted in R.C. Majumdar (ed.), Vol. VI, The Delhi Sultanate, Bombay, Majumdar, R.C. (ed.), The History and Culture of the Indian People: Volume VI: The Delhi Sultanate, Bombay, 1960.

God , Shoe , Way , Time

“It might come as a surprise to many, but the truth is that Islam today no longer has a living and evolving theology. In fact, with few exceptions, Islam’s last genuine theologians belong to the early part of the 19th century. Go to any mosque anywhere, whether it is in New York or Mecca, and you are more likely to hear a political sermon rather than a theological reflection. In the highly politicized version of Islam promoted by Da’esh, al Qaeda, the Khomeinists in Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Boko Haram in Nigeria, God plays a cameo role at best. Deprived of its theological moorings, today’s Islam is a wayward vessel under the captaincy of ambitious adventurers leading it into sectarian feuds, wars and terrorism. Many, especially Muslims in Europe and North America, use it as a shibboleth defining identity and even ethnicity. A glance at Islam’s history in the past 200 years highlights the rapid fading of theologians. Today, Western scholars speak of Wahhabism as if that meant a theological school. In truth, Muhammad Abdul-Wahhabi was a political figure. His supposedly theological writings consist of nine pages denouncing worship at shrines of saints. Nineteenth-century “reformers” such as Jamaleddin Assadabadi and Rashid Rada were also more interested in politics than theology. The late Ayatollah Khomeini, sometimes regarded as a theologian, was in fact a politician wearing clerical costume. His grandson has collected more than 100,000 pages of his writings and speeches and poetry. Of these, only 11 pages, commenting on the first and shortest verse of the Koran, could be regarded as dabbling in theology, albeit not with great success.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"The mad dream of a dead empire that unites Islamic rebels" http://nypost.com/2014/06/14/the-mad-dream-of-a-dead-empire-that-unites-islamic-rebels/, New York Post (June 14, 2014).
New York Post

God , War , Truth , School

“Muslim power again suffered a setback after the death of Alauddin Khalji in 1316 AD. But it was soon revived by the Tughlaqs. By now most of the famous temples over the length and breadth of the Islamic empire in India had been demolished, except in Orissa and Rajasthan which had retained their independence. By now most of the rich treasuries had been plundered and shared between the Islamic state and its swordsmen. Firuz Shah Tughlaq led an expedition to Orissa in 1360 AD. He destroyed the temple of Jagannath at Puri, and desecrated many other Hindu shrines….
After the sack of the temples in Orissa, Firuz Shah Tughlaq attacked an island on the sea-coast where 'nearly 100,000 men of Jajnagar had taken refuge with their women, children, kinsmen and relations'. The swordsmen of Islam turned 'the island into a basin of blood by the massacre of the unbelievers'. A worse fate overtook the Hindu women. Sirat-i-Firuz Shahi records: 'Women with babies and pregnant ladies were haltered, manacled, fettered and enchained, and pressed as slaves into service in the house of every soldier.' Still more horrible scenes were enacted by Firuz Shah Tughlaq at Nagarkot (Kangra) where he sacked the shrine of Jvalamukhi. Firishta records that the Sultan 'broke the idols of Jvalamukhi, mixed their fragments with the flesh of cows and hung them in nosebags round the necks of Brahmins. He sent the principal idol as trophy to Medina.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

S.R. Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

Death , Women , Men , Fate

“It was hidden in a wild wood
Of the larch and pine;
It had been unto his childhood
Solitude and shrine, —
There he dream'd the hours away.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1836-2) (Vol.47) Subjects for Pictures. III. Rienzi Showing Nina the Tomb of his Brother
The Monthly Magazine

Solitude , Childhood

“Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

It Is a Beautious Evening, l. 12 (1807).

God

“At home these men’s works [ Kant, Schiller, Goethe] were kept in the bookcase with the green glass panes in Papa’s study, and Törless knew this bookcase was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor. It was like the shrine of some divinity to which one does not readily draw nigh and which one venerates only because one is glad that thanks to its existence there are certain things one need no longer bother about.”

Robert Musil (1880–1942) Austrian writer

as translated by E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser (1955), p. 115
Young Törless (1966)

Men , Home , Study , Drawing

“There is no need for a shrine. Start building something small. […] It is to be one square tsubo. This structure of one square tsubo is not for human habitation. […] Additions can be made depending on your minds.”

Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) Founder of Tenrikyo

The Life of Oyasama, Foundress of Tenrikyo, p. 42–3
The Life of Oyasama

Dependency

“They took captive a great number of handsome and elegant maidens, amounting to 20,000, and children of both sexes, 'more than the pen can enumerate'… In short, the Muhammadan army brought the country to utter ruin, and destroyed the lives of the inhabitants, and plundered the cities, and captured their offspring, so that many temples were deserted and the idols were broken and trodden under foot, the largest of which was one called Somnat, fixed upon stone, polished like a mirror of charming shape and admirable workmanship' Its head was adorned with a crown set with gold and rubies and pearls and other precious stones' and a necklace of large shining pearls, like the belt of Orion, depended from the shoulder towards the side of the body….
'The Muhammadan soldiers plundered all these jewels and rapidly set themselves to demolish the idol. The surviving infidels were deeply affected with grief, and they engaged 'to pay a thousand pieces of gold' as ransom for the idol, but they were indignantly rejected, and the idol was destroyed, and 'its limbs, which were anointed with ambergris and perfumed, were cut off. The fragments were conveyed to Delhi, and the entrance of the Jami' Masjid was paved with them, that people might remember and talk of this brilliant victory.' Praise be to God, the Lord of the worlds. Amen! After some time, among the ruins of the temples, a most beautiful jasper-coloured stone was discovered, on which one of the merchants had designed some beautiful figures of fighting men and other ornamental figures of globes, lamps, etc., and on the margin of it were sculptured verses from the Kurdn. This stone was sent as an offering to the shrine of the pole of saints… At that time they were building a lofty octagonal dome to the tomb. The stone was placed at the right of the entrance. "At this time, that is, in the year 707 h. (1307 a. d.), 'Alau-d din is the acknowledged Sultan of this country. On all its borders there are infidels, whom it is his duty to attack in the prosecution of a holy war, and return laden with countless booty."”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Somnath. Abdu’llah ibn Fazlu’llah of Shiraz (Wassaf) : Tarikh-i-Wassaf (Tazjiyatu’l Amsar Wa Tajriyatu’l Ãsar), in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. III : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 43-44. Also quoted in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

Men , God , War , Children

“I am God of Origin, God in Truth. There is causality in this Residence. At this time I have descended here to save all humankind. I wish to receive Miki as the Shrine of God.”

Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) Founder of Tenrikyo

The Life of Oyasama, Foundress of Tenrikyo, p. 1
The Life of Oyasama

God , Truth , Time

“Philips, whose touch harmonious could remove
The pangs of guilty power and hapless love!
Rest here, distress'd by poverty no more;
Here find that calm thou gav'st so oft before;
Sleep undisturb'd within this peaceful shrine,
Till angels wake thee with a note like thine!”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Epitaph on Claudius Philips, the Musician
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love , Peace , Angels , Sleep

“The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday

Men , God , Youth , Daughters

“Beware of flattery! 'tis a flowery weed,
Which oft offends the very idol-vice,
Whose shrine it would perfume.”

Elijah Fenton (1683–1730) British poet

Act IV, Scene V, p. 46
Mariamne: A Tragedy (1723)

“Around thee and above,
Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black,
An ebon mass; methinks thou piercest it,
As with a wedge! But when I look again,
It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,
Thy habitation from eternity!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

St. 1
"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)

Home

“Shine, ye stars of heaven,
On a world of pain!
See old Time destroying
All our hoarded gain;
All our sweetest flowers,
Every stately shrine,
All our hard-earned glory,
Every dream divine! Shine, ye stare of heaven,
On the rolling years!
See how Time, consoling,
Dries the saddest tears,
Bids the darkest storm-clouds
Pass in gentle rain,
While upspring in glory
Flowers and dreams again!”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"Shining Stars".
Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses (1858)

Pain , World , Dreams , Star

“Those who will not worship at the shrine of money, need not hope for recognition. On the other hand, they will also not have to think other people’s thoughts or wear other people’s political clothes. They will not have to proclaim as true that which is false, nor praise that as humanitarian which is brutal.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

Intellectual Proletarians (1914)

Money , People , Hope , Thinking

“And here they met: where should Love’s meeting be —
Love passionate, and spiritual, and deep—
Where, but in such a haunted solitude—
A green and natural temple—fitting shrine
For vows the stars remember?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Last of the St. Aubyns
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Love , Star , Nature , Solitude

“The Mahabharata carries a complete picture of this cultural unity in its tîrtha-yãtrã-parva, which is part of the larger Vana-parva. The Pandavas accompany their Purohita, Dhaumya, on a long pilgrimage to all parts of Bharatavarsha. They pay their homage to many mountains, rivers, saMgamas, lakes, tanks, forest groves and other sacred shrines which had become hallowed by association with Gods and Goddesses, rishis and munis, satees and sãdhvees, heroes and heroines. And they feel fulfilled as they never did before or after in their long lives. The same Pandavas made an imperial conquest of the whole country, not once but twice and performed a rãjasûya yajña at the end of each triumph. But the Pandava empire is a faint memory of the forgotten past. On the other hand, the sacred spots which the Pandavas visited during their one and only pilgrimage, draw millions of devotees in our own days as they did in the distant past, long before the Pandavas appeared on the scene.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

God , Feeling , Mountain , Distant

“I fear the vermin that shall undermine
Senate and citadel and school and shrine.”

Edwin Markham (1852–1940) American poet

The Vermin in the Dark, stanza 5, lines 1 and 2, in The Speaker (1911), volume 6, number 3, page 249.

Fear , School

“I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Edward Dowse (19 April 1803)
1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)

“Shrine of the mighty! can it be
That this is all remains of thee?”

George Gordon Byron The Giaour

Source: The Giaour (1813), Line 106.

“The Duke of Devonshire issues a circular applying for subscriptions to oppose this Bill, and he charges us with the robbery of God. Why, does he not know—of course he knows—that the very foundations of his fortune are laid deep in sacrilege, fortunes built out of desecrated shrines and pillaged altars…I say that charges of this kind brought against a whole people…ought not to be brought by those whose family trees are laden with the fruits of sacrilege. I am not complaining that ancestors of theirs did it, but they are still in the enjoyment of the same property, and they are subscribing out of that property to leaflets which attack us and call us thieves. What is their story? Look at the whole story of the pillage of the Reformation. They robbed the Catholic Church, they robbed the monasteries, they robbed the altars, they robbed the almshouses, they robbed the poor, and they robbed the dead. Then they come here when we are trying to seek, at any rate to recover some part of this pillaged property for the poor for whom it was originally given, and they venture, with hands dripping with the fat of sacrilege, to accuse us of robbery of God.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1912/may/16/second-reading-fourth-days-debate in the House of Commons (12 May 1912) on the Bill to disestablish the Anglican church in Wales
Chancellor of the Exchequer

God , People , Family , Tree

“From the far reaches of the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River, the faithful approached the city of Mecca. All had the same objective to worship together at the most sacred shrine of Islam, the Kaaba in Mecca. One such traveler was Mansa Musa, Sultan of Mali in Western Africa. Mansa Musa had prepared carefully for the long journey he and his attendants would take. He was determined to travel not only for his own religious fulfillment, but also for recruiting teachers and leaders, so that his realms could learn more of the Prophet's teachings.”

Mahmud Kati (1468–1593) Malian historian

Faith , Travel , Learning , Teachers

“For example, Monstuart Elphinstone, a Governor of Bombay, suggested in his Minute dated 14 May 1859: “Divide et Impera was the old Roman motto, and it should be our”. Given the circumstances, it would have been foolish of any imperialist power not to follow such a policy. But for achieving this aim there was no need for them to distort Indian history. British historians had just to reiterate what the Muslim chroniclers themselves had written about the “glorious achievements” of their kings and conquerors. Their stories needed no proof: they stood confirmed by the hundreds of vandalised medieval monuments. The mistake lay with the misjudgement of our Congress-culture Government and the so-called secularist and Stalinist historians. They chose to treat history as a handmaid of politics to please the Muslim minority. They instructed their text-book writers to eschew mention of unpalatable historical facts like destruction of temples and forced conversions by Muslims in history, language and social science. But perpetration of lies has proved counter-productive. It has encouraged Muslims to ask for proof as to when Babur or Aurangzeb broke this or that temple, knowing full well that such shrines were actually vandalised and razed.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 8

Books , History , Science

“When squint-eyed Slander plies the unhallow'd tongue,
From poison'd maw when Treason weaves his line,
And Muse apostate (infamy to song!)
Grovels, low muttering, at Sedition's shrine.”

James Beattie (1735–1803) Scottish poet, moralist and philosopher

The Judgment of Paris (1765), stanza 109.

“Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,
scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly
to find an unexpected waterfall,
not half a mile from the nearest road,
a spot so hard to reach that no one comes —
a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies
and nesting jays, a sign that there is still
one piece of property that won't be owned.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Rough Country" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/roughcountry.htm
Poetry, The Gods of Winter (1991)

“Alexander Gardner who later became the Colonel of Artillery in the service of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, had travelled extensively in Central Asia from 1819 to 1823 C. E. He saw a lot of slave-catching in Kafiristan, a province of Afghanistan, which was largely inhabited by infields at that time. He found that the area had been reduced to “the lowest state of poverty and wretchedness” as a result of raids by the Muslim king of Kunduz for securing slaves and supplying them to the slave markets in Balkh and Bukhara. He writes:
“All this misery was caused by the oppression of the Kunduz chief, who not content with plundering his wretched subjects, made an annual raid into the country south of Oxus, and by chappaos (night attacks) carried off all the inhabitants on whom his troops could lay their hands. These, after the best had been selected by the chief and his courtiers, were publicly sold in the bazaars of Turkestan. The principal providers of this species of merchandise were the Khan of Khiva, the king of Bokhara (the great hero of the Mohammedan faith), and the robber beg of Kunduz.
“In the regular slave markets, or in transactions between dealers, it is the custom to pay for slaves in money; the usual medium being either Bokharan gold tillahs (in value about 5 or 51/2 Company rupees each), or in gold bars or gold grain. In Yarkand, or on the Chinese frontier, the medium is the silver khurup with the Chinese stamp, the value of which varies from 150 to 200 rupees each. The price of a male slave varies according to circumstances from 5 to 500 rupees. The price of the females also necessarily varies much, 2 tillahs to 10,000 rupees. Even the double the latter sum has been known to have been given.
“However, a vast deal of business is also done by barter, of which we had proof at the holy shrine of Pir-i-Nimcha, where we exchanged two slaves for a few lambs’ skins! Sanctity and slave dealing may be considered somewhat akin in the Turkestan region, and the more holy the person the more extensive are generally his transactions in flesh and blood.””

Alexander Gardner (soldier)

Alexander Gardner subsequently found a Muslim fruit merchant at Multan “who was proved by his own ledger to have exchanged a female slave girl for three ponies and seven long-haired, red-eyed cats, all of which he disposed of, no doubt to advantage, to the English gentlemen at this station.”
Memoirs of Alexander Gardner, edited by Major Hugh Pearce, first published in 1898, reprint published from Patiala in 1970, quoted from Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 1

Money , Faith , Travel , Girl

“The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout our land, seems to have no genuine devotees in these peculiar villages; and unless some of its missionaries penetrate there, and erect banking houses and other pious shrines, there is no knowing how long the inhabitants may remain in their present state of contented poverty.”

Washington Irving (1783–1859) writer, historian and diplomat from the United States

The Creole Village published in The Knickerbocker magazine (November 1836). This is origin of the expression almighty dollar. See Edward Bulwer-Lytton for "the pursuit of the almighty dollar". Compare: "Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold, And almost every vice,—almighty gold", Ben Jonson, Epistle to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland.

Universe , Housing

“Throughout the Muslim rule destruction of Hindu shrines and construction of mosques and other building from their materials and at their very sites went on as a normal practice. From the Quwwal-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi built out of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples in the twelfth century to the Taj-ul-Masajid built from hundreds of Hindu and Jain temples at Bhopal in the eighteenth century, the story is the same everywhere.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 8

“But song has touch'd my lips with fire,
And made my heart a shrine;
For what, although alloy'd, debased,
Is in itself divine.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Source: The Venetian Bracelet (1829), Lines of Life

Heart

“Another soft and scented page,
Fill’d with more honied words!
What motives to a pilgrimage
A shrine like mine affords!
I know, before I break the seal,
The words that I shall find:”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Belinda, or The Love Letter
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Motivation

“Every man worships the dollar, and is down before his shrine from morning to night… Other men, the world over, worship regularly at the shrine with matins and vespers, nones and complines, and whatever other daily services may be known to the religious houses; but the New Yorker is always on his knees.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Source: North America (1862), Ch. 14

Men , World , Housing , Night

“Who shall say
The love of genius is a common thing,
Such as the many feel—half selfishness,
Half vanity?—for genius is divine,
And, like a god, doth turn its dwelling-place
Into a temple; and the heart redeem'd
By its fine influence is immortal shrine
For love's divinity.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

A Summer Evening’s Tale
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Love , God , Feeling , Heart

“Many Japanese speak English. But they do not think our thoughts. They worship at other shrines; profess another creed; observe a different code. They can no more be moved by Christian pacifism than wolves by the bleating of sheep. We have to deal with a people whose values are in many respects altogether different from our own.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The Mission of Japan, Collier's, 20 February 1937.
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 365. ISBN 0903988429
The 1930s

People , Thinking

“Their record has been matched only recently by Communism, considered a Christian heresy by thinkers like Bertrand Russell. In China, the communist regime destroyed half a million Buddhist shrines. (Were the Buddhists there also in the habit of hoarding their gold in their shrines, thus attracting communist expropriatory justice and getting them destroyed in the process? Or was it a rare example of an act purely motivated by an ideology? Probably Stalinist historians of the JNU would like to explain.)”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

Justice , Communication , Motivation

“Creeds pass, an inexhaustible supply of faith remains, with which man proceeds to rebuild temples, churches, chapels and shrines.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…

The Faith that Heals (1910)
Context: Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith — the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible. Intangible as the ether, ineluctable as gravitation, the radium of the moral and mental spheres, mysterious, indefinable, known only by its effects, faith pours out an unfailing stream of energy while abating nor jot nor tittle of its potency. Well indeed did St. Paul break out into the well-known glorious panegyric, but even this scarcely does justice to the Hertha of the psychical world, distributing force as from a great storage battery without money and without price to the children of men.
Three of its relations concern us here. The most active manifestations are in the countless affiliations which man in his evolution has worked out with the unseen, with the invisible powers, whether of light or of darkness, to which from time immemorial he has erected altars and shrines. To each one of the religions, past or present, faith has been the Jacob's ladder. Creeds pass, an inexhaustible supply of faith remains, with which man proceeds to rebuild temples, churches, chapels and shrines.

Faith

“But as he willed 'tis ordered all,
And woes, by heaven ordained, must fall—
Unsoothed by tears or spilth of wine
Poured forth too late, the wrath divine
Glares vengeance on the flameless shrine.”

Aeschylus Agamemnon

Source: Oresteia (458 BC), Agamemnon, lines 68–71 (tr. E. D. A. Morshead)

Tear , Wine

“My experience has been that of the unconscious rather than the deliberate faith healer. Phenomenal, even what could be called miraculous, cures are not very uncommon. Like others, I have had cases any one of which, under suitable conditions, could have been worthy of a shrine or made the germ of a pilgrimage.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…

The Faith that Heals (1910)
Context: While in general use for centuries, one good result of the recent development of mental healing has been to call attention to its great value as a measure to be carefully and scientifically applied in suitable cases. My experience has been that of the unconscious rather than the deliberate faith healer. Phenomenal, even what could be called miraculous, cures are not very uncommon. Like others, I have had cases any one of which, under suitable conditions, could have been worthy of a shrine or made the germ of a pilgrimage.

Faith

“The human race is like a snake—it sheds. Ever and anon, as the ages bloom, old forms of thought are superseded by intellectual bran-news. Shrines at which one generation adores become to the succeeding desolate and despised.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Preface"
Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895)

Age

“In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel

As quoted on Look magazine, and reproduced by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency http://www.jta.org/1962/01/04/archive/ben-gurion-foresees-gradual-democratization-of-the-soviet-union, 4 January 1962.

“And do not think, my boy, that because I, impulsively broke forth in jubillations over Shakspeare, that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs who burn their tuns of rancid fat at his shrine. No, I would stand afar off & alone, & burn some pure Palm oil, the product of some overtopping trunk.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine Duyckinck punch; but that the muzzle which all men wore on their soul in the Elizebethan day, might not have intercepted Shakspers full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakspeare, was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.—There, I have driven my horse so hard that I have made my inn before sundown.
Letter to Evert Augustus Duyckinck (3 March 1849); published in The Letters of Herman Melville (1960) edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, p. 79

Thinking , Boy