Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.

- Yoko Ono

Let us remember that, as much has been given us, much will be expected from us, and that true homage comes from the heart as well as from the lips, and shows itself in deeds.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

- Henry David Thoreau

There is only one valid way to partake of the universe -- whether the partaking is of food and water, the love of another, or, indeed, a pill. That way is characterized by reverence -- a reverence born of a felt sense of participation in the universe, a kinship with all and with all matter.

- Larry Dossey

A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.

- Mark Twain

Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.

- Mark Twain

What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.

- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.


A Humanist Code of Ethics:

Do no harm to the earth, she is your mother.

Being is more important than having.

Never promote yourself at another's expense.

Hold life sacred; treat it with reverence.

Allow each person the digity of his or her labor.

- Arthur Dobrin

Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external.

- Louise Guiney

My best Acquaintances are those
With Whom I spoke no Word--
The Stars that stated come to Town
Esteemed Me never rude
Although to their Celestial Call
I failed to make reply--
My constant--reverential Face
Sufficient Courtesy.

- Emily Dickinson

Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past!

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one's own tradition with reverence for different traditions.

- Abraham Joshua Heschel

The conception of worth, that each person is an end per se, is not a mere abstraction. Our interest in it is not merely academic. Every outcry against the oppression of some people by other people, or against what is morally hideous is the affirmation of the principle that a human being as such is not to be violated. A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered. [From: An Ethical Philosophy of Life]

- Felix Adler

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

letter to Connecticut Baptists

- Thomas Jefferson