Tradition Quotes

She always says she dislikes the abnormal it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.

Gertrude Stein

The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement.

John Stuart Mill

The way of the world is to praise dead saints and persecute living ones.

Nathaniel Howe

There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

George Santayana

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead it means that the dead are living.

Harold Macmillan

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

W Somerset Maugham

Custom that unwritten law By which the people keep even kings in awe.

Charles Davenport

Habit is stronger than reason.

George Santayana

Laws are never as effective as habits.

Adlai Stevenson

Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time which explains why young years pass slowly while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course.

Thomas Mann

The gnarled fidelity of an old habit.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Habit is the enormous flywheel of society its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.

William James

Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit.

Henry Adams

The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything - or nothing.

Lady Astor

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

Samuel Johnson

When you are accustomed to anything you are estranged from it.

George Cabot Lodge

A precedent embalms a principle.

Benjamin Disraeli

Contemporary man has rationalized the myths but he has not been able to destroy them.

Octavio Paz

Custom is second nature and no less powerful.

Michel Eyquem Montaigne

Custom reconciles us to everything.

Edmund Burke

Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional forms and ceremonies.

Joseph Wood Krutch

Habit is a great deadener.

Samuel Beckett

Habit is habit and not to be thrown out of the window by any man but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

Mark Twain

Have a place for everything and keep the things somewheres else. That is not advice it is merely custom.

Mark Twain

He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.

John Stuart Mill

In some remote regions of Islam it is said a woman caught unveiled by a stranger will raise her skirt to cover her face.

Raymond Mortimer

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of custom: but of all these perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous by simple repetition ceases to be miraculous.

Thomas Carlyle

It is well to lie fallow for a while.

Martin F. Tupper

The questions that we must ask ourselves, and that our historians and our children will ask of us, are these: How will what we create compare with what we inherited? Will we add to our tradition or will we subtract from it? Will we enrich it or will we deplete it?

Leon Wieseltier

In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.

Terry Eagleton

Nice customs curtsy to great kings.

William Shakespeare

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Every generation is inculcated in traditions of prejudice which are encouraged as normal, natural and healthy.

Bryant McGill

What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition.

C.S. Lewis

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past -- no matter how good it was.

Jeff Bezos

It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.

Evelyn Waugh

By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust. In truth, the whole progress of civilization is based upon this power.

Julian Huxley

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity.

Bill Bryson

The believer is not a slave to fa

Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips

It’s an old Camorri tradition for when a bunch of people are planning something stupid,” said Locke. “Actually, we have a lot of traditions for that. You’ll find out

Scott Lynch

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

T.S Eliot

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

Evelyn Waugh

Never become a slave to tradition, learn to foresee new things.

Sunday Adelaja

Men will always create new arenas for honor if traditional rituals fade.

Joel Dinerstein

We believe that a man does not have to be devoted to the winning side for his loyalty to be celebrated with reverence.

Hock G. Tjoa

Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.”Patricia Briggs.

Demetra Angelis Foustanellas

Brand-new truths are probably not Truths.

John Piper

I find it inspiring to actively choose which traditions to celebrate and also come up with new ideas for traditions of my own.

Sara Sheridan

As I wrote 'The Christmas Lamp' I realized that tradition is priceless, whether you have a small family, a large family, or no family.Tradition doesn't have to be logical; it only has to emphasize the light of Christ and his everlasting love.

Lori Copeland

Tradition is the prison where change is detained... To make a change, you need to agree that you are not going with the statement "this is how we do it"! Yes, that was how it was done, but what next? Agree to change!

Israelmore Ayivor

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

Donald Kingsbury

There is no such thing as passive receiving of Tradition. He who receives, the disciple, is always — must always be — the scene of a creation. To receive is to create, to innovate! 'The petrification of acquired knowledge — the freezing of spiritual things — allowing itself to be placed like an inert content in the mind and to be handed on, frozen, from one generation to another, is not real transmission….' Handing on is 'resumption, life, invention and renewal, a mode without which revealed thinking, that is to say, thinking which is authentically thought, is not possible.

Marc-Alain Ouaknin

Tradition is a foolish man's excuse for not thinking

Joshua Ayala-Arias

What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents.

William Barrett

… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having been taught how to freely speculate, how to profoundly question, and how to playfully define. Spontaneity of speculation being synonymous with the philosophical-poetic, the philosophical-poetic with the rural philosopher-poet, and by roundelay the rural philosopher-poet thee with the spontaneity of speculation be. And by the way of the rural what may we say? A philosopher-poet of illimitable space we say. Iohannes Scottus Ériugena the metaphor of old salutes you; salutes your lyrical ear and your skilful strumming of the rippling harp. (Source: Hearing in the Write, Canto 19, Ivy-muffled)

Richard McSweeney

The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

T.S Eliot

Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let's be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

The true rightist is not a man who wants to go back to this or that institution for the sake of a return; he wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and then either to restore or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it is ancient, contemporary, or even without precedent, brand new, "ultramodern." Old truths can be rediscovered, entirely new ones found. The Man of the Right does not have a time-bound, but a sovereign mind.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Immorality sanctified by tradition is still immorality.

Bernard E. Rollin

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Tradition Quotes

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