Quotes About Tradition

Jonathan Safran Foer

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

Gli abitanti del villaggio diventarono incarnazioni di quella leggenda che avevano ascoltato tante volte.

The point of eating these special foods with those special people at those special times was that we were being deliberate, separating those meals out from the others. Adding another layer of deliberateness has been enriching. I'm all for compromising tradition for a good cause, but perhaps in these situations, tradition wasn't compromised so much as fulfilled.

The Thanksgiving turkey is the flesh of competing instincts —of remembering and forgetting.

We celebrate together, and that makes sense. And we don't just gather, we eat. This wasn't always so. The federal government first thought to promote Thanksgiving as a day of fasting, since that was how it had been frequently observed for decades.

Una vez que me fueron leídos, se me propuso que jurase su cumplimiento, primero a la usanza de mi propio país y luego según el procedimiento descrito por las leyes de allá, y que consistió en sostenerme en alto el pie derecho con la mano izquierda, al tiempo que me colocaba el dedo medio de la mano derecha en la coronilla y el pulgar en la punta de la oreja derecha.

They bury their dead with their heads directly downward, because they hold an opinion, that in eleven thousand moons they are all to rise again; in which period the earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found ready standing on their feet.

is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a share past

Un idioma es una tradición, un modo de sentir la realidad, no un arbitrario repertorio de símbolos. (A language is a tradition, a way of grasping reality, not an arbitrary assemblage of symbols.)

Cada lenguaje es una tradición, cada palabra, un símbolo; es baladí lo que un innovador es capaz de alterar...

para los antiguos la palabra escrita no era otra cosa que un sucedáneo de la palabra oral.

I am returning to the language my ancestors spoke fifty generations ago; I am returning to that language; I am reclaiming it. It is not the first time I speak it; when I had other names this was the language I spoke.

When a country has a strong spirit, foreign and exotic influences do not debilitated that spirit, they strengthen it. - German Literature in the Age of Bach

De un castigo, de un pacto o de un privilegio, porque las versiones difieren y apenas dejan entrever el fallo de un Dios que asegura a una estirpe la eternidad, si sus hombres, generación tras generación, ejecutan un rito.

Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not readily melt. Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display different degrees of this ability to survive, we almost always find that actual group and national behavior more or less departs from what we should expect it to be if we tried to infer it from the dominant forms of the productive process.

He's taken courses on things like animal tracking, making a fire with a bow drill, building survival shelters in the forest. Now, my being an Indian, you might imagine I would know about all that stuff. But most Indian kids, even those on the rez, are not learning those things anymore. They're too busy doing all the things other kids do—watching DVDs, playing Xbox games, and downloading rap music on their iPods.

However, despite our lack of facial hair, every Navajo recruit was still expected to put soap on his face each morning and scrape away his imaginary beard. What you did in boot camp did not have to make sense. You just had to do it.

Waiting is something you get used to when you're Native American.

Myth is what we call other people's religion.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a He. You cannot say God is a She. You cannot say God is an It. (18)