Cathedral

A cathedral is a church that contains the cathedra (Latin for "seat") of a bishop, thus serving as the central church of a diocese, conference, or episcopate.

Quotes

 * I learnt more during my school-days from my visits to the Cathedral at Winchester than I did from the hours of religious instruction in school. That great church with its tombs of the Saxon kings and the mediaeval statesmen-bishops gave one a greater sense of the magnitude of the religious element in our culture and the depths of its roots in our national life than anything one could learn from books.
 * Christopher Dawson, Understanding Europe (Doubleday Image Books: 1960), pp. 223–24


 * We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.
 * Medieval Quarry Worker's Creed. As cited in The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. Also cited in Deep Work by Cal Newport.


 * Christopher Wren, the leading architect of London's reconstruction after the great fire of 1666, lies buried beneath the floor of his most famous building, St. Paul's cathedral. No elaborate sarcophagus adorns the site. Instead, we find only the famous epitaph written by his son and now inscribed into the floor: "si monumentum requiris, circumspice"—if you are searching for his monument, look around. A tad grandiose, perhaps, but I have never read a finer testimony to the central importance—one might even say sacredness—of actual places, rather than replicas, symbols, or other forms of vicarious resemblance.
 * Stephen Jay Gould: The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001), "A Tale of Two Work Sites", p. 251


 * The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still, no doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last.
 * Victor Hugo, in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, book 3, ch. 1: "Notre-Dame"