49 Quotes About Rites of Passage

A rite of passage is a celebration for one that leaves one group to enter another. For many, this is a a cultural significance. Here are some quotes about rites of passages that are encouraging.

“A great newspaper ought to be printing things that people care about, issues that people care about.”

“Adjusting to the passage of time, I think, is a key to success and to life: just being able to roll with the punches.”

“After a while, though, you realize that a whole slew of young singer-songwriter piano players are getting compared to you. That’s when you feel the passage of time is occurring.”

“Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.”

“Feverishly we cleared away the remaining last scraps of rubbish on the floor of the passage before the doorway, until we had only the clean sealed doorway before us.”

“For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.”

“For too long, our society has shrugged off bullying by labeling it a ‘rite of passage’ and by asking students to simply ‘get over it.’ Those attitudes need to change. Every day, students are bullied into silence and are afraid to speak up. Let’s break this silence and end school bullying.”

“Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?”

“Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?”

“I cannot in good conscience vote for final passage of legislation that would pave the way to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.”

“I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.”

“I keep sailing on in this middle passage. I am sailing into the wind and the dark. But I am doing my best to keep my boat steady and my sails full.”

“I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.”

“I think that we all have to have that rite of passage of dating the tortured artist who seems cooler than we think we are; we aspire to be like them, and we’re excited that somebody is turning us on to new music or a new lifestyle.”

“It sometimes seems easier to trace the great general laws of God’s government in the passage of events far from us than in those close around us. We see the shape of those far-off constellations, but we cannot group or set in order that to which our own sun belongs.”

“I’ve always loved watches my whole life. When I was growing up, I always thought of having a great watch as that next step – of making it, of a rite of passage.”

“I’ve found that music allows years to fold like an accordion over each other, so I guess you don’t feel the passage of time as much.”

“Just touching that old tree was truly moving to me because when you touch these trees, you have such a sense of the passage of time, of history. It’s like you’re touching the essence, the very substance of life.”

“Like the diminishing beauty returns for a facially paralyzed Botox addict, the more forcefully we attempt to stop the passage of time, the less available we are to the very moment we seek to preserve.”

“Living most of the time in a world created mostly in one’s head, does not make for an easy passage in the real world.”

“Look at almost any passage, and you’ll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It’s not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it’s just that that’s the way language works.”

“Most women have learned a great deal about how to set goals for our First Adulthood and how to roll with the punches when we hit a rough passage.”

“My rite of passage into my brave new world, life on the road.”

“Natural disasters in Bolivia have been getting worse with the passage of time. It’s brought about by a system: the capitalist system, the unbridled industrialization of the resources of the Planet Earth.”

“Old age and the passage of time teach all things.”

“On my passage thither, I discovered nothing remarkable in the features of the country.”

“Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.”

“People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying. Paul Auster”

“Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can’t do, fear or even disgust at growing old.”

“Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”

“The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.”

“The message of Jesus is summed up partly in the Sermon on the Mount, and partly when he begins his ministry and quotes the passage from Isaiah: ‘I have come to set free the prisoners and restore sight to the blind.'”

“The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer’s movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space.”

“The passage of time hasn’t changed the fact that abortion is a serious, lethal violation of fundamental human rights, and that women and children deserve better, and that the demands of justice, generosity, and compassion require that the right to life be guaranteed to everyone.”

“The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains.”

“The rite of passage of learning to build a fire that will burn all night with one match is not an insignificant one in my husband’s family, and I grew up camping and backpacking. I love to camp.”

“The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.”

“The vision quest was a real departure for me. But now I feel I can stand on my own two feet. I’m a much stronger person, more like an adult and less like a child.”

“The wisdom acquired with the passage of time is a useless gift unless you share it.”

“There aren’t a lot of opportunities for that rite of passage that makes you a man. War is one of them, and violent sports are another.”

“There has been far too much hypocrisy in the field of civil rights. It is easy enough to give rousing speeches or call for legislation which has no possibility of passage.”

“There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it’s gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.”

“Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.”

“To me rites of passage through life, that’s a wonderful, beautiful thing.”

“Trust has to be earned, and should come only after the passage of time.”

“We have to be able to grow up. Our wrinkles are our medals of the passage of life. They are what we have been through and who we want to be.”

“When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.”

“When I was a child, going to a circus with wild animal acts was a rite of passage. These days, it’s an act of complicit cruelty.”

There are various types of rite of passage that people go through depending upon the destination and civilization.