Quotes About Tradition

Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.

I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.

There are always Uncles at Christmas.

Buddhism is primarily a study of mind and a system for training the mind. It is spiritual in nature, not religious. Its goal is self-knowledge, not salvation; freedom, not heaven. It relies on reason and analysis, contemplation and meditation, to transform knowledge about something into knowledge that surpasses understanding. But without your curiosity and questions, there is no path, no journey to be taken, even if you adopt all the forms of the tradition.

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year.

The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.

Collections of gnomes, adages, sayings, and parables have been made from times immemorial in all countries and in all languages possessing some kind of literature.

WELCOME, ONCE AGAIN, to the beautiful Sinclair family. We believe in outdoor exercise. We believe that time heals. We believe, although we will not say so explicitly, in prescription drugs and the cocktail hour. We do not discuss our problems in restaurants. We do not believe in displays of distress. Our upper lips are stiff, and it is possible people are curious about us because we do not show them our hearts. It is possible that we enjoy the way people are curious about us.

They're doing just as I asked them to. As we Sinclairs always do. Pretending. Lying. Trying to have a good time.

The Sinclairs are athletic, tall, and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive

Oxford is -- Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

I believe in aristocracy. . . — if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.

Our emphasis on saving makes sense when we consider that most of us think of our options as either saving or spending. But the biblical witness and Christian tradition suggest that there's another option: sharing.

In collectivist societies, conversion is not strictly an individual decision, so it is often not an individual experience.

It's a bad idea to try to prevent people from knowing their own history. If you want to do anything new you must first make sure you know what people have tried before.

It is not their standard of craftmanship which is different from ours, but their ideas.

I have tried to tell the Story of Art as the story of a continuous weaving and challenging of traditions in which each work refers to the past and points to the future. For there is no aspect of this story more wonderful than this-- that a living chain of tradition still links the art of our own days with that of the Pyramid age.

E]very community insists on what Professor G. J. Renier calls "the Story that must be told" about its own past, and where scholarship decays, myth will crowd in.

I believe in courtesy. It is the way we avoid hurting people's feelings. She thought that maybe, just maybe, western civilization was in decline because people did not take time to take tea at four o'clock.

I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn't die in the room where they were born?

One knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her - that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy

Every barbarian must give the Acropolis its chance once.