Churchmen sought to introduce rational trial procedures and sophisticated legal principles in place of the superstition-based trial by ordeal that had characterized the Germanic legal order.
She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.
The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.
High school wasn't a trial by fire or some ordeal that had to be survived. It was all a big joke. You just had to provide the laugh track.
The only way I hear gossip is if it's big enough and loud enough for my friends to bring it up to me. Or if it's, like, a big untrue ordeal from my publicist - and she hates making that phone call!
There's a rumour going 'round that if you amass a certain number of penalty points on your driving licence, the authorities will make you take your test again! Now, if ever there was an incentive to drive carefully, they could not have threatened a m...
I don’t know what more to say... I did not follow up in the days to come. I did not, I did, I should, I could... Just like that, I let that entire ordeal go.
A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.
As mortal humans we are born with a death sentence anyway, so what difference does a little poison make? Why not take a chance you will survive the ordeal and make something significant of your life?..." p330
I used to suffer from stage fright, which at times was an ordeal. I won't perform live again. I'm going to do some TV shows and videos but nothing else... I don't like to travel too much or do concerts. I'm more of a studio and home girl.
For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo...
The Nobel Prize has been a disturbance at the beginning of October for some years. It would be gratifying to win, but it would be quite an ordeal, too, with all the events which go on for two days. I'd think carefully about what I was doing the day i...
Well, I think they're all basically the same story. Every culture in the world has them. When you strip it down and analyze it, it's the young man or girl who goes through a trial or ordeal and hits a very low ebb but manages to get guidance from a M...
I think I remember what love was like before. There were complex emotional and biological factors. We had elaborate tests to pass, connections to forge, ups and downs and tears and whirlwinds. It was an ordeal, an exercise in agony, but it was alive....
One of my few childhood memories is as an eight-year-old, refused permission to watch the Hitchcock season on Irish television, sneakily viewing 'The Birds' though a crack in the living-room door. It transformed my hitherto perfectly enjoyable half-m...
When most people think about the future, they dream up ways that they might live happier lives. But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don't usually talk about happiness. It is usually the ordeals t...
Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive pr...
I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because ....fill in the blank with whatever/whoever ...
As he walked along, consciously enjoying the early coolness of the morning, he turned and looked behind him. People often do this and are usually surprised to find that there is some reason for turning around. Sometimes there is no apparent reason an...
Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken bel...
The silent horror of Archie's ordeal had been temporarily replaced by the howling, agonising pain of the blood refusing to drain from his penis, the end of which was a deep purple verging on black where Officer Griff had tested how hard it was by usi...
