Tradition Quotes

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

~ T.s. Eliot

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

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

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

It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.

~ Evelyn Waugh

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

~ Jeff Bezos

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

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

~ Bryant Mcgill

Tradition does not mean a dead town, it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago, I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

~ G.k. Chesterton

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

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

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 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

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

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