I wasn't losing my focus but I was getting tired of focusing. What I was focusing on was becoming too routine, too ritual, not something that was interesting, new and exciting.
We are, at almost every point of our day, immersed in cultural diversity: faces, clothes, smells, attitudes, values, traditions, behaviours, beliefs, rituals.
For me, songwriting is something I have to do ritually. I don't just wait for inspiration; I try to write a little bit every day.
When I was growing up, hand washing was a ritual, but now it's a necessity. A child dies every 15 seconds from preventable causes, which has got to stop.
I don't have a special place or ritual for writing songs, basically I write songs whenever an idea hits me, in my hotel room, on the road, in the plane.
For faithful Catholics, communion is not just a nice ritual: It is the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and the ultimate sign of our willingness to be incorporated into the church.
I think when you compete every week, when you play under pressure daily, you find your rituals to be 100 percent focused on what you're doing.
Humankind spends so much time admiring and ritualizing the inventions of humankind! And yet humankind is such a tiny part of all there is. -- Nigel S. Hey, Wonderment(Matador, 2012)
The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith.
I'm condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in many ways, including everyday tasks.
I had a very simple life growing up in the farm country outside of Perugia, and biscotti and warm milk with a tiny bit of coffee were a big part of my morning ritual before walking to school.
We don't have too much ritual in our life anymore. And these life symbols which people rely on to keep their feeling of well being, that life is not too bad after all are required more and more.
Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.
I have the greatest love for the rituals of organised religion - the sense of community and belonging it can confer to people. But me, I'm more a questioner than a follower; not by whim or fashion, but as a decision painfully arrived at after much, m...
I am tolerably ignorant about Judaism, and much of what I do know about it seems hard to swallow, because it is so grounded in legalism, and adherence to rituals.
Scaremongering is an age-old political ritual. There are public officials who have benefited by playing up the 'hacker threat' so that they can win approval by cracking down on it.
I really like the ritual of shaving. I like getting the perfect brush and finding the right sandalwood soap. The act of shaving, though, is not fun. I like beards and the ease of them.
You'll almost encounter a superstition amongst musicians, people sort of go through strange rituals, what they need to do to write a song.
I know that baseball players have certain rituals or habits that they develop, because sometimes it becomes somewhat superstitious if they get on a streak and want to do the same thing over and over again.
In my midteens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism, but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual.
One of Obama's most impressive attributes is his quiet confidence: Voters sense that he is comfortable in his own skin, a dedicated father and friend who won't waste time with the phony rituals of Washington.
