Tradition Quotes

The individuals inside are frequently fighting that their individual voices be heard, while the walls of the place, which are the mask, and the perception, are reluctant to give over to the voices of the individuals. Those in the margins are always trying to get to the center, and those at the center, frequently in the name of tradition, are trying to keep the margins at a distance. Part of the identity of a place is the tension between those in the margins, and those in the center, and they all live behind the walls which wear the tradition.

~ Anna Deavere Smith

It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of everyman’s life, but it’s writ large, and we love it.

~ Tom Hiddleston

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.

~ Grace Murray Hopper

If you assume that the new - and simply because it's new - is always to be better than the old, chances are you've never known anything valuable.

~ Criss Jami

The Gingerbread House has four walls, a roof, a door, a window, and a chimney. It is decorated with many sweet culinary delights on the outside.But on the inside there is nothing—only the bare gingerbread walls.It is not a real house—not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room.That’s when the stories can move in.They will stay in residence for as long as you abstain from taking the first gingerbread bite.

~ Vera Nazarian

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

~ Albert Schweitzer

When tradition is thought to state the way things really are, it becomes the director and judge of our lives; we are, in effect, imprisoned by it. On the other hand, tradition can be understood as a pointer to that which is beyond tradition: the sacred. Then it functions not as a prison but as a lens.

~ Marcus J. Borg

The more wakeful a man is to the things which surround him, the more asleep is he, and his waking is worse than his sleep.

~ Idries Shah

Touching your cap to the squire may be damn bad for the squire, but it's damn good for you.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

When people criticize me for not having any respect for existing structures and institutions, I protest. I say I give institutions and structures and traditions all the respect that I think they deserve. That's usually mighty little, but there are things that I do respect. They have to earn that respect. They have to earn it by serving people. They don't earn it just by age or legality or tradition.

~ Myles Horton

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

~ Boris Pasternak

Worship, then, needs to be characterized by hospitality; it needs to be inviting. But at the same time, it should be inviting seekers into the church and its unique story and language. Worship should be an occasion of cross-cultural hospitality. Consider an analogy: when I travel to France, I hope to be made to feel welcome. However, I don't expect my French hosts to become Americans in order to make me feel at home. I don't expect them to start speaking English, ordering pizza, talking about the New York Yankees, and so on. Indeed, if I wanted that, I would have just stayed home! Instead, what I'm hoping for is to be welcomed into their unique French culture; that's why I've come to France in the first place. And I know that this will take some work on my part. I'm expecting things to be different; indeed, I'm looking for just this difference. So also, I think, with hospitable worship: seekers are looking for something our culture can't provide. Many don't want a religious version of what they can already get at the mall. And this is especially true of postmodern or Gen X seekers: they are looking for elements of transcendence and challenge that MTV could never give them. Rather than an MTVized version of the gospel, they are searching for the mysterious practices of the ancient gospel.

~ James K.a. Smith

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

~ Gustav Mahler

On the street below, the weather is calm. But up here, high winds threaten to topple the workers. A sudden gust can knock them from their footing with its sheer force or send a fatal vibration through the beams on which they stand. And yet the men joke, laugh, stroll across the foot-wide beams as though they are on solid ground. To the people on the sidewalk, tiny as ants below, the skywalkers appear entirely unafraid. A hundred years ago, their grandfathers and great-grandfathers built the skyscrapers and bridges that surround them.

~ David Weitzman

There is no creation without tradition, the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form, novelty is always a variation on the past.

~ Carlos Fuentes

Thus there is an ancient Christian tradition, from Augustine to John Paul II, which has believed and argued that sexual difference is significant. With varying degrees of explicitness, the greatest theologians in the Christian West have been relatively cohesive on the point that sexual difference, which enables biological procreation and which humans share with animals, has more than physical and animal significance. To synthesize, based on the material we have examined in this book, I propose the following theological significance for sexual difference: The same God whom we know in Christ has, in his goodness, created us as male and female. To be male or female, then, is to be blessed, for it is to be something that is good. To be this sexually differentiated creature is to be something that will be redeemed, and redeemed as it was made and not as some other creature; in other words, sexual difference is not something human beings should attempt to ignore or deplore. Sexual difference is something humans should embrace and welcome, for to do that is to honor creation and anticipate redemption. Such a way of life, to which Christ calls all human beings, means to love the neighbor and enable the neighbor to be what he or she is meant to be in the sexual sphere.

~ Christopher C. Roberts

Old Ways May Not Give You UpAn elderly man in a Lobi village once renounced the spirits in favor of Islam by discarding the very beliefs in spirits and mystical inanimate objects that have held our societies together for more three centuries. He threw his fetishes in a nearby lake. Sadly he turned and walked away from the lake and the traditions. As the elder walked away, the fetishes leaped out of the lake onto his back again to reclaim him.“Sometimes the old ways will not give you up”…Chief–Lobi Tribe

~ James M. Robinson

Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised.

~ Gregory B. Sadler

Generosity is also marked by doing what one says one will do.

~ Idries Shah

The people of the world have a fixed destiny. But the spiritually developed receive what is “not” in their destiny.

~ Idries Shah

The would-be students wish to transcend books.But, ask yourselves: if someone says that books do not contain wisdom, and yet he writes books; books do not contain Sufism, and yet he continues to publish books on Sufism, what is really happening? It really is your duty, and not mine, to ask and to find the answer to that question, if you are interested enough.

~ Idries Shah

The advantage of having an artistic tradition is that the younger artist could see an organic link between the real life of one's country and its art work which is a sublimation of that life.

~ Kuo Pao Kun

Immorality sanctified by tradition is still immorality.

~ Bernard E. Rollin

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

Some problems were generational, you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types.

~ Iain M. Banks

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 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

… 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

Tradition was safety, change was danger.

~ Mary Doria Russell

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 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

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

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

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

Brand-new truths are probably not Truths.

~ John Piper

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

~ Demetra Angelis Foustanellas

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

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

~ Joel Dinerstein

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

~ Sunday Adelaja

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