Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning. If we don't, it may drench itself out in sorrow.

- Joan Baez

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Any religion...is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.

Selected Essays, 1927

- T. S. Eliot

When humans participate in ceremony, they enter a sacred space. Everything outside of that space shrivels in importance. Time takes on a different dimension. Emotions flow more freely. The bodies of participants become filled with the energy of life, and this energy reaches out and blesses the creation around them. All is made new; everything becomes sacred.

- Sun Bear

Only within burns the fire I kindle.
My heart the altar.
My heart the altar.

- Poem of a Buddhist nun

Names are changed more readily than doctrines, and doctrines more readily than ceremonies.

- Thomas Love Peacock