#Tradition Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Old fashions please me best; I am not so niceTo change true rules for odd inventions.”

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

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

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

“A love of tradition has never weakened a nation.”

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

“Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.”

“The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.”

“Conservatism is the policy of make no change and consult your grandmother when in doubt.”

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

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

“And while you bring all countries with you, you come with a purpose of leaving all other countries behind you - bringing what is best of their spirit, but not looking over your shoulders and seeking to perpetuate what you intended to leave behind in them.”

“Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.”

“All wisdom is not new wisdom.”

“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.”

“When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.”

“A spot whereon the founders lived and diedSeemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,Or gardens rich in memory glorifiedMarriages, alliances, and families,And every bride's ambition satisfied.”

“Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?”

“Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.”

“I really wanted to write a book [99: Stories of the Game] on the tradition and history of the league, where kids can pick it up and read it and learn things and say, "Geez, I didn't know that. That's pretty cool."”

“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.”

“So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.”

“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?”

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.”

“The Gothic idea that we were to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind, and to recur to the annals of our ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion and in learning, is worthy of those bigots in religion and government by whom it has been recommended, and whose purposes it would answer. But it is not an idea which this country will endure.”

“Everything Changes. The only thing that remains immovable across the centuries and fixes the character of a people is cooking.”

“People ask 'do you make a conscious effort not to swear?' - if you're doing silly stuff you're not tempted to put swearing in. All the comics from my childhood, who were funny without swearing, were the people that influenced me. What I do is quite traditional anyway.”

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

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

“Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.”

“Customs will often outlive the remembrance of their origin.”

“I love writing thank-you notes. There's something very nostalgic to me about the feel of a card and putting pen to paper. How many times in our lives are we required to put pen to paper anymore?”

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

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

“A university is a place where ancient tradition thrives alongside the most revolutionary ideas. Perhaps as no other institution, a university is simultaneously committed to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.”

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

“Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”

“The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.”

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

“The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.”