Quotes About Tradition

Keep in mind that for most of history people just made things, and they didn't make such a big freaking deal out of it.

May I assume that everything about a traditional wedding is repugnant and off-putting to you?" "That's correct.

But there is one critical gift that a traditional Hmong bride almost always receives on her wedding day which all too often eludes the modern Western bride, and that is the gift of certainty. When you have only one path set before you, you can generally feel confident that it was the correct path to have taken. And a bride whose expectations for happiness are kept necessarily low to begin with is more protected, perhaps, from the risk of devastating disappointments down the road.

women all seemed to be living in constant service to their husbands. (They either served their men happily or with resentment—but they all served.)

The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.)

For a group of nationalist intellectuals much later in history to have sat down and decided that Dante's Italian would now be the official language of Italy would be very much as if a group of Oxford dons had sat down one day in the early nineteenth century and decided that—from this point forward—everybody in England was going to speak pure Shakespeare.

There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse.

Be very careful, warns this tale, not to get too obsessed with the repetition of religious ritual just for its own sake.

I wish I could make a better job of my clothes. My mother taught me about weather and tides, she taught me eight languages and how to make various medicines, but she never thought to teach me to spin and weave and sew, because I was a boy. It seems silly now.

Didn't Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn't it expert in superstition?

We have all, of course, heard the story of the invention of the croissant, the tribute of a Parisian pastry chef to Vienna's victory over the Ottomans. The croissant, of course, represented the crescent moon of the Ottoman flags, a symbol the West devours with coffee to this very day.

A great stag woven of rushes and fluttering with green ribbons was borne through the streets to the music of pipe and tabor. Crowds of women surrounded it, leaping and grabbing at the ribbons.

Read it out loud, dear," Grace ordered, as Angela opened the card tied to the yellow-ribboned box. To the bride-to-be in the kitchen stuck, An asparagus cooker and lots of luck. from Cookie Barfspringer "Thank you," Angela said, wondering which one was the Barfspringer. The next gift was an egg poacher. The box in pink ribbons contained another asparagus cooker. "I sure hope Doctor Deere likes asparagus," someone remarked.

the old, less rigidly organized Christianity of the Celtic Church lingered stubbornly there, even though the Roman rite had prevailed. They would accept a runaway novice, all the more when they heard him sing and play; they would provide him a patron and a house harp, and strip him of his skirts and find him chausses and shirt and cotte in payment for his music.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a "mummified" form.

Yet it puzzled me that no one around me seemed to take God very seriously. We neither believed nor disbelieved. He was our oldest habit.

And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:The old order changeth, yielding place to new;And God fulfills himself in many ways,Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

It will be evident to you that I am here controverting the most cherished tradition of modern philosophy, shared alike by the school of empiricists which derives from Hume, and the school of transcendental idealists which derives from Kant.

Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.

The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith's for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar.

Christmas is probably too bourgeois.