Quotes About Tradition

When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.

The Malays can hardly be said to have an indigenous literature, for it is almost entirely derived from Persia, Siam, Arabia, and Java. Arabic is their sacred language.

No Persian meal is complete without an abundance of herbs.

For Indians, chai resolves most things, consoles for the things it can't.

Every fire on this ghat is lit from a dhuni (sacred fireplace) that has been burning continuously here since Satya Yuga. It is not for anyone to bring their own matchbox!

Boy children are primed to expect everything from their wives in the marriage, and not give too much if anything at all.

It's not an accident that the best cooking in Tuscany is found at home. It's the place where Tuscans' passionate love for food meets their passionate love for family and friends.

Why not collect and clean chicken wishbones in the run-up to Christmas, spray them silver and use each to pinch together a white hem-stitch napkin?

Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual?

Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.

Abstain from beans.

They insist upon the shaving of the moustache, I think, in order that they may accustom the young men to obedience in the most trifling matters.

It is certainly desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

The woman cries before the wedding and the man after.

T]here are more and more Western scholars who [...] strive to experience Buddhism directly in the Eastern countries where it has long been a central element of cultural tradition. They must be clearly distinguished from those Westerners who, unable or unwilling to confront themselves with their own Western tradition, frivolously escape to any different world.

Similarly that is no true democracy in which the whole crowd of citizens is free to do whatever they wish or purpose, but when, in a community where it is traditional and customary to reverence the gods, to honor our parents, to respect our elders, and to obey the laws, the will of the greater number prevails, this is to be called a democracy.

Unspontaneity is of their essence. In these rites I discover that something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from divine revelation. This is why the Christian East calls the liturgy the "Divine Liturgy", expressing thereby the liturgy's independence from human control.

Deeper understanding of the matter is bound to recognize that the Temple, as well as the synagogue, entered into Christian liturgy.

Liturgy is like a strong tree whose beauty is derived from the continuous renewal of its leaves, but whose strength comes from the old trunk, with solid roots in the ground.

he claimed to be one of the last true conservatives—only, to conserve, you had to prune and graft and adjust.