Cathedral Quotes

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.

My own introduction to music came quite early. My father didn’t have much of an education, but he was keen for me to get some qualifications, and I ended up winning a choral scholarship to a cathedral school.

He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.

Action shouldn’t just be seeing all those crashes. You can blow up a cathedral; next time you blow up the Great Wall of China, and then what? But when you’re in love with your characters, the smallest action becomes an important action.

I say that building peace is like building a cathedral. You have to have a solid base, and then you do it brick by brick. But the process is irreversible. There’s no way back.

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.

As a child, I was always intrigued by the question: what is it that distinguishes a city from a town? Is it size? Population? Location? When I asked grown-ups, the confident answer was that a city has to have a cathedral – which, to a child raised in a devout Catholic setting, made sense.

You’re either singing on TV or in front of a full cathedral and there’s a bit of pressure there. I know it sounds funny but if you get used to doing it, then performing in front of people playing cricket is the same sort of thing.

When I visit any cathedral, it reminds me of being with my grandparents. They weren’t particularly religious, but my grandfather was obsessed with architecture.

Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.

There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

My faith grew strong, and I sent a letter (as I was ordered) to the Rev. Dignitary of the Cathedral of Exeter. I was assured, before I sent it, he would not answer it.

I read the Scriptures at the American Cathedral on Christmas and Easter; that’s it. It’s a task I love.

Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.

I remember singing as a chorister in Peterborough Cathedral, having won a music scholarship to go to school there, and realising for the first time in my life what true excellence was.

Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and woman how the human and the divine love could go hand in hand.

At first, people thought I was just some kind of kook. But now they see the cathedral, see what I have done, and they are supportive.

The Christmas market at the Barcelona Cathedral sells all kinds of things for your Nativity scene. It will also give you a good idea of Catalan culture.

I’m never happy with what I’ve written. You imagine, before you start, there’s a cathedral, and the moment it starts on the page, it’s a garden shed. And then you just try to make it the best shed you can.

How wonderful to know that Christianity is more than a padded pew or a dim cathedral, but that it is a real, living, daily experience which goes on from grace to grace.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then – and not until then – will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth.

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.

I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

The Crystal Cathedral is not an attempt to be an architectural ego-statement. It’s probably the ultimate spiritual and psychological statement that could be made in architectural terms.

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.

The Zocalo is a magnificent space, at least four times the size of Trafalagar Square, with the National Palace on one side, the huge cathedral on the other, and in one corner part of the old Aztec City so brutally destroyed by Hernan Cortez and the Conquistadores.

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.

I loved Forcalquier, with its narrow medieval streets. Its elegant 12th Century cathedral boasts a carillon that chimes every Sunday morning. I also found a junk shop from which I could have furnished our entire farm.

I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains – Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur‘s Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father’s spiritual touchstone, his chapel and cathedral in the wild.

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.

It is an exceptional event to build a cathedral – it must withstand several lifetimes.

Beauty is not generic, bland, and clinical. It isn’t all things to all people. The Cathedral of Notre Dame in its endlessly intricate detail was beautiful. Modern office buildings are not.

Every sport needs its temple, its cathedral.

The Sabbath is a weekly cathedral raised up in my dining room, in my family, in my heart.

In Montreal, when I grew up, I’d go to the Notre-Dame Basilica, a gorgeous cathedral in town. I’d listen to huge symphony orchestras, Pavarotti singing operas; that was absolutely marvelous. I like that aspect of the cathedral, the spectacle.

But I did get to see the Notre-Dame cathedral, which was really special to me. I’m completely heartbroken over the fire, but I’m really glad that they’re gonna be able to salvage it.

People said making clothes inside out was not proper. I disagreed, because clothes that are inside out are as beautiful as a cathedral.