Selected tradition quotes

1. Don't compare me with Jesus. He is a great master, a great master...

2. Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

3. Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

4. The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.

5. All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.

6. Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.

7. Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.

8. When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before.

9. Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there.

10. The wisdom of our ancestors.

11. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

12. Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.

13. I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

14. Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.

15. The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honor the territorial imperative.

16. Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again; finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.

17. A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.

18. The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.

19. Precedents deliberately established by wise men are entitled to great weight. They are evidence of truth, but only evidence...But a solitary precedent...which has never been reexamined, cannot be conclusive.

20. Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

21. I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it.

22. People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.

23. Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

24. In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: 'We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.'

25. The vows we take in the holy place bind us till we are purged of them at Inanda's Kraal. Till then no blood must be shed and no flesh eaten. It was the fashion of our forefathers.

26. How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

27. And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale.

28. To be modern only means to fill new forms with eternal truths.

29. The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

30. The judge's authority depends upon the assumption that he speaks with the mouth of others. That is to say, the momentum of his utterances must be greater than any which his personal reputation and character can command, if it is to do the work assigned to it - if it is to stand against the passionate resentments arising out of the interests he must frustrate - for while a judge must discover some composition with the dominant trends of his times, he must preserve his authority by cloaking himself in the majesty of an overshadowing past.

31. Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

32. Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

33. Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.

34. Hinduism is a living organism. One and indivisible at the root, it has grown into a vast tree with innumerable branches. Knowledge is limitless and so also the application of truth. Everyday we add to our knowledge of the power of Atman (soul) and we shall keep on doing so.

35. No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

36. Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

37. If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever.

38. The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.

39. The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made ... Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities ... Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.

40. Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.

41. Even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. To be a good lawyer, one must have a mind and a disposition to venerate the past; a respect for precedents; a belief in the wisdom and the sanctity of the dead. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be, incompatible with the practice of law.

42. Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around - not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.

43. Tradition is not, as post-modernists maintain, a library or museum the artist plunders. It is the endless conversation between the living and the dead. Young artists enter into this conversation passionately - not merely intellectually, though study and analysis play a part. They live and breathe it. Tradition is not a public building. It is a love affair.

44. I for one hope that some of the standards of the old world carry over. (February 2005)

45. 1: Be like your ancestors or be different, it doesn't matter.

46. Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all...Here we have 'leftist' confusion instead of natural human music. The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, 'formalist' attempt to create originality through cheap clowning. It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.

47. Strong families value their extended family, particularly grandparents. In one study of college students, a majority thought their interactions with grandparents reflected high family strengths. It's important to create continuity between generations, passing along traditions and making roots ever stronger, so the tree continues to reach for the sun.

48. Classicism is a mask and does not reflect transition. How can such a static expression allow interpretation of human life as we know it? A fire house should not resemble a French Chateau, a bank a Greek temple and a university a Gothic Cathedral. All of the '-isms' are imposition on life itself, by way of previous education.

49. Throughout the world, change is the order of the day. In every Nation economic problems, long in the making, have brought crises of many kinds for which the masters of old practice and theory were unprepared. In most Nations social justice, no longer a distant ideal, has become a definite goal, and ancient Governments are beginning to heed the call. Thus, the American people do not stand alone in the world in their desire for change. We seek it through tested liberal traditions, through processes which retain all of the deep essentials of that republican form of representative government first given to a troubled world by the United States.

50. 'Them fancy London types don't know the pleasure of eating chips with fingers'

51. To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection - the comparative increase of population and wealth - of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be 'fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it' (Genesis 1:28). This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

52. An aversion to nationalism is fully compatible with a deep attachment to national traditions. But the fact that I prefer and feel reverence for some of the traditions of my society need not be the cause of hostility to what is strange and different.

53. The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig - with the stress on the 'old.'

54. The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty, and the majesty That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and watery depths,-all these have vanished; They live no longer in the faith of reason.

55. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.

56. 'All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense.'

57. Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesnt fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.

58. He is not deserving of the name of Englishman who speaketh against ale, that is, good ale.

59. Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game; football is a 20th century technological struggle.

60. Now this problem of the adjustment of man to his natural resources, and the problem of how such things as industrialization and urbanization can be accepted without destroying the traditional values of a civilization and corrupting the inner vitality of its life - these things are not only the problems of America; they are the problems of men everywhere. To the extent that we Americans become able to show that we are aware of these problems, and that we are approaching them with coherent and effective ideas of our own which we have the courage to put into effect in our own lives, to that extent a new dimension will come into our relations with the peoples beyond our borders, to that extent, in fact, the dreams of these earlier generations of Americans who saw us as leaders and helpers to the peoples of the world at large will begin to take on flesh and reality.

61. George Wyndham once told me that he had seen one of the first aeroplanes rise for the first time and it was very wonderful but not so wonderful as a horse allowing a man to ride on him. Somebody else has said that a fine man on a fine horse is the noblest bodily object in the world. Now, so long as people feel this in the right way, all is well. The first and best way of appreciating it is to come of people with a tradition of treating animals properly; of men in the right relation to horses.

62. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.

63. To the delight of millions of little children, the Santa in New York's great parade will be half of a same-sex couple. And guess who the other half will be? Me! Harvey Fierstein, nice Jewish boy from Bensonhurst, dressed in holiday finery portraying the one and only Mrs. Claus.

64. My verse forms are relatively traditional (traditions alter). In general they have moved away from strict classical patterns in the direction of greater freedom - as is usual with most artists learning a trade. It takes courage, however, to leave all props behind, to cast oneself, like Matisse, upon pure space. I still await that confidence.

65. The swimming hole is still in use. It has the same mudbank. It is still impossible to dress without carrying mud home in one's inner garments. As an engineer I could devise improvements for that swimming hole. But I doubt if the decrease in mother's grief at the homecoming of muddy boys would compensate the inherent joys of getting muddy.

66. 'Walimah is only in five occasions: in the 'Urs, Khurs, 'Idhar, Wikar and the Rikaz - 'Urs is when a person gets married; and Khurs is when a child is born; and 'Idhar is on the circumcision of a baby boy; and Wikar is when a person purchases a house; and Rikaz is when a person returns from Hajj.'

67. All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again; and may the last ones understand my words better than those who listen to me directly.

68. I learned to spin and to sew; in sewing and spinning I fear no woman in Rouen.

69. Spent an hour in the beginning of the evening at Major Gardiner's, where it was thought that the design of Christianity was not to make men good riddle-solvers, or good mystery-mongers, but good men, good magistrates, and good subjects, good husbands and good wives, good parents and good children, good masters and good servants. The following questions may be answered some time or other, namely, - Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring Ecclesiastical Synods? Convocations? Councils? Decrees? Creeds? Confessions? Oaths? Subscriptions? and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion incumbered with in these days?

70. A hair of the dog that bit us.

71. You marry to be worthy of a gift, and want to say so out loud, but without shouting. One doesn't shout a prayer. Marriage is one of the few ceremonies left to us about which it is impossible - or at least self-demeaning - to be cynical.

72. Jewish custom, which traces descent solely from the mother, is more sensible and more discreet. Our own lawgivers can't accept the fact that there are many things in family life that are best kept shrouded in mystery.

73. Fidelity to roots does not mean a mechanical copying of the patterns of the past. Fidelity to roots is always creative, ready to descend into the depths, open to new challenges. [1]

74. It will probably be conceded that it is desirable people should exercise their understandings, and that an intelligent following of custom, or even occasionally an intelligent deviation from custom, is better than a blind and simply mechanical adhesion to it. (pp. 73-74)

75. Country radio doesn't program hardly anybody over 40. Country music is about tradition. And they're losing that tradition. In my mind, anyway.

76. 'The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, vesting every individual with equal rights, was directly opposed to the hierarchical social structure of indigenous Fijian society. Chiefs were at the apex by virtue of their birth and rank. The rest of the people had a communal functional role in this hierarchy.'

77. The law, being an inherited accumulation, imposes itself on each generation willy-nilly. Any society whose members enter and leave it severally must for very convenience, to say nothing of deeper reasons, proceed by tradition; the neophyte must adopt existing habits and ways of acting, if for no better reason, through inexperience and diffidence. Mere custom will do the rest as he proceeds. And so the rule is canonized, its origins, and therefore its meaning, are ignored. But genuine learning is quite different.

78. And so the arbitrary union of three incommensurate, mutually disconnected concepts became the basis of a bewildering theory... [by which] one of the lowest renderings of art, art for mere pleasure - against which all of the master teachers warned - was idealized as the ultimate in art.

79. His heart was one of those which most enamour us, Wax to receive, and marble to retain: He was a lover of the good old school, Who still become more constant as they cool.

80. Bonfires dot the rolling hillsides Figures dance around and around To drums that pulse out echoes of darkness And moving to the pagan sound.

81. As you turned to go I heard you call my name, You were like a bird in a cage spreading its wings to fly 'The old ways are lost,' you sang as you flew And I wondered why.

82. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world - and never will.

83. Let us remain attached to the land... In the country, there are stability, common sense and strong religious convictions.

84. In strategy you must know the Ways of other schools, so I have written about various other traditions of strategy in this the Wind Book.

85. The foundation of our religion is very strong. The material is strong as well, but the building itself was neglected for hundreds of years. As the plaster dropped down, none thought to replace it and none felt the need to reinforce the building. Quite the contrary: many foreign elements and interpretations, as well as empty beliefs, came along and damaged it still more.

86. 'Ernest Van Den Haag, a sociologist, wrote a fascinating book called The Jewish Mystique. I read that book, got a lot out of it, and went over to Ayn and said, 'I've got to tell you something shocking.' Because we never thought of ourselves as Jewish in any important way, I announced, laughing, 'We are both exponents of the Jewish messianic tradition. We believe we are here on earth to be signposts pointing to the good life.' What I got out of that book was how Jewish that was. The whole idea of these prophets coming along, or however he was describing it-it fit Ayn and me to a tee. I thought that was very funny.'[7]

87. Even in cultures where marriages are arranged by parents, you're never actually forbidden to fall in love with your mate.

88. In the village where I live, in Sussex, we made our bonfire in the Vicarage paddock and every year, as soon as it was lit, the Vicar's cow would begin to dance. She danced while the flames rose up to the sky, she danced till the ashes were black and cold. And the next morning-it was always the same-the Vicar would have no milk for his breakfast. It is strange to think of a simple cow rejoicing at the saving of Parliament so many years ago.

89. Since 1939, however, there have been no bonfires on the village greens. No fireworks gleam in the blackened parks and the streets are dark and silent. But this darkness will not last forever. There will some day come a Fifth of November-or another date, it doesn't matter-when fires will burn in a chain of brightness from Land's End to John O' Groats. The children will dance and leap about them as they did in the times before. They will take each other by the hand and watch the rockets breaking, and afterwards they will go home singing to the houses full of light...

90. The light through the stained glass was cobalt and red. And the frayed cuffs and collars were mended by haloes of golden thread. The choir sang, 'Once Upon a Time There Was An Ocean.' And all the old hymns and family names came fluttering down as leaves of emotion. As nothing is different, but everything's changed.

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

92. There are always two parties, the party of the past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement...

93. When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.

94. I am in favor of preserving the French habit of kissing ladies' hands - after all, one must start somewhere.

95. You gotta find a good woman. Not too smart, not too dumb. Not too old, not too young. One that can cook and clean.

96. Most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths.[2]

97. Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it.[2]

98. Biblical scholars tell us that this is the same meal that Jesus ate at the last supper. But hey, I'm sure you have a good reason for ordering something else.

99. Both the children, Aryan (12th November 1997) and Suhana (23rd May 2000) have been taught to revere the co-existence of Ganpati and Allah in the Khan household. How wonderfully they are being brought up manifests itself in the story that when Shah Rukh was having a critical neck surgery, Aryan went to the temple and said an Islamic prayer so that his father could get well soon.

100. I have long recognized the theory and aesthetic of such comprehensive display: show everything and incite wonder by sheer variety. But I had never realized how powerfully the decor of a cabinet museum can promote this goal until I saw the Dublin [Natural History Museum] fixtures redone right. [:] The exuberance is all of one piece-organic and architectural. I write this essay to offer my warmest congratulations to the Dublin Museum for choosing preservation-a decision not only scientifically right, but also ethically sound and decidedly courageous. The avant-garde is not an exclusive locus of courage; a principled stand within a reconstituted rear unit may call down just as much ridicule and demand equal fortitude. Crowds do not always rush off in admirable or defendable directions.