Quotes About Tradition

Proof of our society's decline is that Halloween has become a broad daylight event for many.

Stories were heirlooms in these parts.

The Egyptians took their goods to their graves with them. The great dynasties of Britain and Europe try to keep things in the family so long as there is something in the bank. But Americans prefer to turn it into cash and start anew. They are less sentimental about these things.

Orthodox Judaism does not place undue emphasis on hellfire and damnation, nor are children specially pressured to search their souls for sin. But the priorities of a cheder education were anything but material. Read, read, read. Study, study, study. These were the objectives of school — and of life itself.

the burial practices in the Pharonic tradition were undertaken not merely to provide a receptacle for the physical body of the deceased, but also to make a place to retain the metaphysical knowledge which the person had mastered in his lifetime

The roll call of ancestors," he wrote, "includes no figures of outstanding importance in history." Rather, he said, what his book did provide was "a record of men and women who lived active, useful lives, and who gave to their nation and their communities the best that was in them.

All of us together were of a generation born of old country people who spoke English with an accent and prayed in another language, who drank red wine and cooked their food in the old country way, and peeled apples and pears after dinner.

upon that change he passes over to the ranks of the Old Salts and ceases to be a Boot forever. Youth rebels and age conserves; between them, they advance.

Youth rebels and age conserves; between them, they advance.

Seen through the eyes of Arab alchemists, or Persian mystics, the earliest Greek philosophers weren't just thinkers or rationalists. They were links in an initiatory succession

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it.

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past." — British Major Ronald Balfour of the Monuments Men

How influential was Paul Sachs? Because he was short, about five foot two, he hung paintings low on the wall. When American museums rose to prominence after the war, many of the directors hung their paintings lower than their counterparts in Europe. Sachs's students had simply accepted it as the norm, and the other museums followed their lead.

We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future.

A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive short-wave facilities scattered about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals.

Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody's mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.

Al reducirse nuestra fe en las ideologías tradicionales, nos dirigimos hacia la fuente en la que todavía creemos: el arte de contar historias.

storytelling is a ritual surrounding a metaphor for life.

A rule says, "You must do it this way." A principle says, "This works … and has through all remembered time.

The long-established and noble rule of Law, one of the greatest products of the character and tradition of British history, has suffered a deadly blow. Blackmail has become respectable.

The Lar was always greeted before crossing the threshold (right foot first), and upon returning home (redire ad Lar em suum). He was invoked before one left on a journey or on campaign

Even in the fourth century (in the heart of the Christian Empire), the natales of the eighteen deified emperors were celebrated;

On 23 August, small live fish were thrown on to the fire pro se ('to redeem oneself or 'for one's well-being') wrote Varro (LL, 6, 20), 'in place of human souls' says Festus more precisely (p. 276