Sacred Spaces Quotes

“Before a wall

of ancient stone,

I place prayers

in cracks of silence.”
― Don Hynes, Stranger to the Beautiful

“I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology… If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of the sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out, and in that tangible evidence you will sense the history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush… the smell of the creosote bush….all elements of the land, and what I mean by “the landscape.”

The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernible, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song….the shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature- the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.

Among the Navajo, the land is thought to exhibit sacred order…each individual undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health…Among the various sung ceremonies of this people-Enemyway, Coyoteway, Uglyway- there is one called Beautyway. It is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time (a Navajo definition of beauty).”
― Barry López, Crossing Open Ground

“If you have been in the vicinity of the sacred - ever brushed against the holy - you retain it more in your bones than in your head; and if you haven’t, no description of the experience will ever be satisfactory.”
― Daniel Taylor, In Search of Sacred Places: Looking for Wisdom on Celtic Holy Islands

“My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way. There was sanctuary in a library, there is sanctuary now, from the war, from the storms of our family and our own anxious minds. Libraries are like the mountain, or the meadows behind the goat lady’s house: sacred space."

[Good Friday world, Salon.com, March 28, 2003]”
― Anne Lamott

“The chances of satisfying my renewed appetite for literary exchanges increased once I began to visit the library more frequently and make my way from the hotel to City Lights Bookstore at 261 Columbus Avenue. For all I was learning about the role its founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, had played in helping to nurture, promote, and sustain the talented souls who made the Beat Movement possible, City Lights became a kind of sacred space for me.”
― Aberjhani, Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

“Like people, places have their own unique energy. If we understand and respect that, we can use them for our growth.”
― Donna Goddard, Love Matters

“The modern architects are incorrect in their thinking. Ornament is not a crime. It is tactile, invigorating, life-sustaining, and human.”
― Kristen Wagner, Reclaiming Classical Design: Reflections on the Harmonious and Beautiful Building

“A holy space is occupied by unholy people.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Decades of desecrating Hawaii’s most sacred spaces with industrial astronomical observatories atop spiritual Hawaiian mountains appears to be in the process of ending.”
― Steven Magee

“The grand purpose of the classically built environment, ultimately, is to propel us out of our finite selves and into the limitlessness of the divine cosmos, to shatter our pretenses and present to us a whole new way of thinking about the meaning of life itself.”
― Kristen Wagner, Reclaiming Classical Design: Reflections on the Harmonious and Beautiful Building