Tradition Quotes

If is a custom,More honor'd in the breach than the observance.

We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do. There are many crimes which are the creation of man himself, the wrongfulness of which is put down to their divergence from habit, custom, or tradition. But cruelty is not of these. It is a fundamental sin, and admits of no argument or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, its protest against cruelty is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us - in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a crank.

Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.

...majority Patriotism is the customary Patriotism.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

One must observe the proper rites.

History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles.

Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.

The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.

But to my mind, though I am native here, And to the manner born, it is a custom, More honored in the breach than the observance.

What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?

They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.

Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.

Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.

The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it

An ancient custom obtains force of nature.

The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

They say I'm old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!

Morality makes stupid.- Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.

[the difference between the old and the new education being] in a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

Every sea-captain who sailed to the West Indies was expected to bring home a turtle on the return voyage for a feast to his expectant friends.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Who keeps the old akindle and adds new knowledge is fitted to be a teacher.

There is not enough self-consciousness about what a family can be, about what it can inherit from forbearers, and what new traditions it can start as a contributor to the community.

All his successors gone before him have done 't; and all his ancestors that come after him may.

I try not to violate what came before me and to leave lots of wiggle room for those who will follow.

There is a mandate to impose a voluntary return to traditional values.

The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.

I do not want my house to be rounded by walls and my windows to be closed to other cultures. I wish to become familiar with the culture of lands as much as possible but I will not permit them to affect me or shake me from my own status.

Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid.

Self-help and self-control are the essence of the American tradition.

Montaigne is wrong in declaring that custom ought to be followed simply because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just.

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

India has an unbroken tradition of nonviolence from times immemorial.

The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

To be moral, correct, and virtuous is to be obedient to an old established law and custom.

Marriage must cease to be a matter of arrangement made by parents for money.

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl - no superior alternative has yet been found.

You cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil that is not native to it.

If you follow the ways in which you were trained, which you may have inherited, for no other reason than this, you are illogical.

Philanthropy, charity, giving voluntarily and freely... call it what you like, but it is truly a jewel of an American tradition.

The English country-gentleman galloping after a fox — the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

I am not an originator but a transmitter.

Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

All wisdom is not new wisdom.

Our American tradition of neighbor helping neighbor has always been one of our greatest strengths and most noble traditions.