Quotes About Tradition

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

When a Sioux Indian would take the calumet, the pipe, he would hold it up stem to the sky so that the sun could take the first puff. And then he'd address the four directions always. In that frame of mind, when you're addressing yourself to the horizon, to the world that you're in, then you're in your place in the world. It's a different way to live.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth.

My definition of mythology is other people's religion, which suggests that ours must be something else. My definition of religion, then, is misunderstood mythology — and the misunderstanding consists in mistaking the symbol for the reference. So all the historic events that are so important to us in our tradition should not be important to us in any way except as symbols of power within ourselves.

The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to to support society.

You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances.

Der gewöhnliche Sterbliche ist nicht nur zufrieden, sondern geradezu stolz, daß er innerhalb der etablierten Grenzen bleibt, und die geläufigen Ansichten tun das ihre, sein Zagen schon vor dem ersten Schritt ins Unerforschte zu bestätigen.

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn't continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood.

The third function is the sociological one—supporting and validating a certain social order. And here's where the myths vary enormously from place to place. You can have a whole mythology for polygamy, a whole mythology for monogamy. Either one's okay. It depends on where you are. It is this sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world—and it is out of date.

Chum was a British boy's weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.

She loved the beauty and the grace of the good old days, but not the rules that kept kids from talking and women from lifting heavy objects if they wanted to. Raleia was beginning to think it would be better to invent a whole new time period where she could pull things from then and now to make the perfect place.

The Royal Family are not like you and me. They live in houses so big that you can walk round all day and never need to meet your spouse. The Queen and Prince Philip have never shared a bedroom in their lives. They don't even have breakfast together.

So much of the Western tradition deals with the most despairing and angst-ridden emotions, but they're movies made for kids. It's as if America was trying to pass on an unpleasant but necessary lesson of life: that you were alone, and you needed to toughen up and shut up.

Old guns rarely die, they just hang on walls.

Washing, this modern behind the ears nonsense.

Study of the past often turns into love of the past and a desire to keep it.

Sickening, the way the youngest de Vibrey girl, to humour the whim of her kinky old father, is actually riding side-saddle today. Twisted round like a blooming corkscrew. Hymen be blowed, think of what it's doing to her innards, poor wretch, think of the strain on her spine when she goes over the fences.

Grammar used to make a good exercise . . . before the days of crosswords.

Le « culturel » vient renforcer le « naturel » dans un cercle vertueux. C'est le fameux « Sois un homme, mon fils »

Première raison de la servitude volontaire, c'est la coutume

I was raised Catholic, but my father's people were Methodist, so we went to both churches.

My mother and my grandmother are pioneers of Mexican cuisine in this country, so I grew up in the kitchen. My mom, Zarela Martinez, was by far my biggest influence and inspiration - and toughest critic.

And this, they say, is how thirteen became the "baker's dozen"—a custom common for over a century, and alive in some places to this day.