Rudolf Otto Quotes

I love, when I'm on holiday in cities, going into church and feeling that reverence and that kind of automatic respect: the sort of magic which exists in those kind of religious temples.

There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.

I am Indian, and I'm proud of it. Indian life is mythologically rich and powerful.

I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals - grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to the unknown god.

Theater is an old thing. It's thousands of years old. TV isn't. Film isn't. We're doing a really old thing.

Mythologicals and historicals have always found takers in India. The audience identifies with them and they make for good family viewing.

I love Greek history. I love Roman history.

In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith, in later times they use the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.

Any representation of God produces accordingly.

I do have a lot of deep religious iconography. I have crosses all over my house, and there's something very attractive about seeing nuns walking down the street. It's not a sexual thing for me; I know it is for some guys.

It's no accident that of all the monuments left of the Greco- Roman culture the biggest is the ballpark, the Colosseum, the YankeeStadium of ancient times.

The basic Roman ruin design is a pile of rocks with a little plaque saying "Roman Ruins" and a group of tourists frowning at it and wishing they were back at the hotel bar.

As a toy fruit or a toy elephant reminds one of the real fruit and the living animal, so do the images that are worshipped remind one of the God who is formless and eternal.

I think that painting is a very ancient form of expression.

The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy... which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.

All of the images of Jesus and of the kingdom are small things: be a light in the darkness.

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.

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.

The tap'ring pyramid, the Egyptian's pride, And wonder of the world, whose spiky top Has wounded the thick cloud.

All places are places of worship to a Christian.

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

Cathedrals are built with pennies of the faithful. A great opera house also is a spiritual center, a temple of sorts, where many gather together for recreation, education, and inspiration - a blessed trinity worthy of public support.

We Christians identify Christ with the sun, and the moon with the Church, the community of the faithful. No one, save Jesus Christ, possesses his or her own light.

Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.