Cathedral Quotes

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)
That great Cathedral space which was childhood. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
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. View quote
Francis Collins
There's a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of Cathedral tunes. View quote
Emily Dickinson
Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling. View quote
Greta Thunberg
The Sabbath is a weekly cathedral raised up in my dining room, in my family, in my heart. View quote
Anita Diament
The challenge of a cathedral is very good for architectural inventiveness. View quote
Oscar Niemeyer
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. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
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. View quote
Timothy Leary
Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral. (Henry Kissinger)
... 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. View quote
Franz Kafka
But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like. View quote
Minoru Yamasaki
In the immense cathedral which is the universe of God, each person, whether scholar or manual laborer, is called to act as the priest of his whole life--to take all that is human, and to turn it into an offering and a hymn of glory. View quote
Paul Evdokimov
I once worked it out - after $12 million, all millionaires are the same. That's because we're all humans, confined to human scale. How many homes can you live in? How many meals can you eat? You can have a living room the size of a cathedral, but you won't live in it. It's too big. View quote
Ricardo Semler
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. View quote
Violette Leduc
I read the Scriptures at the American Cathedral on Christmas and Easter; that's it. It's a task I love. View quote
Olivia De Havilland
For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it's all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that's the definition of spectacle. View quote
Diane Paulus
Maimed but still magnificent... Europe's mightiest medieval cathedral. View quote
R. W. Apple, Jr.
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. View quote
Rollo May
A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral. (Michael Shermer)
[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." View quote
David Lloyd George
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. View quote
Keshub Chunder Sen
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. View quote
Henry Moore
I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson