There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

-James, Henry
The Portrait of a Lady, ch.1.

Surelyarchitecture is the organization for pleasure of enclosed space. And what more magnificent enclosure than a town, a place, a place where the spirit is cuddled, made serene, made proud, happy, or excited depending on the ceremony, the day, the hour.

-Johnson, Philip Cortelyou
  'The Seven Crutches of  Architecture', informal talk to students, School of  Architectural Design, Harvard University, 7 Dec. Published in Perspecta 3 (1955).

A man of your head and hair should owe more to that reverend ceremony, and not mountthemarriage bed like atown-bull, ora mountain-goat; but stay the dueseason and ascend it then with religion and fear.

-Jonson, Ben
^10  Epicoene, act 3, sc.5.

Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.

-Lamb, Charles
  Essays of Elia,'A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People'.

Ceremony, circus, farce, melodrama, tragedy†nothing else offers all at once the whirl, the excitement, the gaiety, the intrigue and the anguish.

-Schlesinger, Arthur M(eier),Jr
  On national political conventions. AThousand Days.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. SeeAchebe 2:18.

-Yeats,W(illiam) B(utler)
  'The Second Coming', l.1^8. Collected in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921).