Quotes About Tradition

The essence of modernity is to deny that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit and that should bind our conduct. To be modern is to be free to choose. What is chosen does not matter; the meaning is in the choice itself. There is no sacred order, no other world, no fixed virtues and permanent truths. There is only here and now and the eternal flame of human desire. Volo ergo sum—I want, therefore I am.

if one's religion is to mean anything, if it is to last, it has to stand outside of time and place. Its truths have to be transcendent. And though we moderns have to find a way to make the tradition livable in our own situations, we must never forget that we don't judge the religion; the religion judges us. To be blunt, a god that is no bigger than our own desires is not God at all, but a divinized rationalization for self-worship.

An anti-culture is inherently unstable, said Rieff, but he doubted that people brought up in this social order would ever be willing to return to the old ways.

Tamás glances down at the floor of his Budapest living room. "We have so many problems today because fathers never talked to their sons as my father did to me in 1963.

Create Small Fortresses of Memory Figes's observation points to one source of resistance: the family and the cultural memories it passes on. Paul Connerton highlights another: religion.

Tradition-minded Christians who have immersed themselves in the writings of Wendell Berry should understand that agrarianism is no panacea. "You can't make a living as a farmer, but you can make a living as a die-setter," says MacDonald. "Industrialism is the new agrarianism. It's not back to the land, but back to the trades.

The Myth of Progress teaches that science and technology will empower individuals, unencumbered by limits imposed by religion and tradition, to realize their desires.

She's a pot-of-tea-before-I-say-boo-to-you woman. There's always a pile of warm teabags in the sink when I come down, like what a horse would leave behind.

The basic technology of writing had been known for at least two thousand years already—nothing new about that.

Our tradition is that of the first man who sneaked away to the creek when the tribe did not really need fish.

I am so excited this year getting to play the 85th Anniversary Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Everyone knows on Thanksgiving morning to get up, turn on the TV and watch the parade, so to be an actual participant is going to be fun and I'm looking forward to it. I am gonna have to put on my deer hunting gear, though, to stay warm!

In our case, as for countless other Jews, the price of integration was the loss of millennia of Jewish tradition. The Torah's instruction gave way to the moral void of modernity, a hectic dance over absence. Many

Instantly Mehmet had clarified the practice of Ottoman succession, which he was later to codify as a law of fratricide: "whichever of my sons inherits the sultan's throne, it behooves him to kill his brother in the interest of the world order.

Scripture is our norming norm and tradition is our normed norm and that in a doctrinal controversy Scripture alone has absolute veto power while The Great Tradition (orthodox doctrine) has a vote but not a veto.

The acids of modernity brought about by modern philosophy were just as corrosive for traditional religion as were the ones created by the new sciences.

a majority of American Catholics now agree that one can marry outside the church and still remain a "good Catholic

That is, we will repeatedly suggest that as denominations have modernized their doctrines and embraced temporal values, they have gone into decline.

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic. —G. K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying

That's one of the things I like best about folk music is the beautiful melodies - and the harmonies - that exist in it. And of course, some of the stories, the story songs.

No truth is more pervasive in Scripture and Christian tradition than this one—that real freedom is found in obedience and servanthood. And yet no truth is more incongruent with modern culture. Here we stand before a stark either-or: the gospel message of true freedom versus the culture's ideal of self-creation, autonomy, and living "my way.

Nowadays a long Romantic tradition has caused us to think of poets as private dreamers, ill-adapted to social intercourse and the horrors of a materialist world but thereby guardians of value and the messengers of our common soul. In 1711 François senior would have viewed a young poet as a modern parent might view an aspirant television celebrity.

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.

Putting lights in Wrigley Field is like putting aluminum siding on the Sistine Chapel.