Quotes About Tradition

We have a tradition in Tibet. Sacred craziness. Men and women who act in a strange way. People think they are fools, but their wisdom, in fact, is more than those we call normal.

it occurred to me that the modern spiritual leaders of my tradition were always somber, self-important men, thickly coated in others' idea of who they were supposed to be.

Rather, it is a warning to avoid turning inspiration into fetish and tradition into dogma; it is an admonition to never reduce the spiritual realm to the narrow borders of your own perceptions, prejudices, and ideals.

Myth safeguards and enforces morality," as Malinowski proclaimed, and if there are no myths there will be no morality.

For centuries those people were hunters, and now hunting has been taken away from them, without anything taking its place. When you separate people from their past without giving them anything in its place, they live with their eyes on that past . . . They're not the ones to blame.

Mathieu didn't know at all what to do about May. He felt a kind of nausea, probably induced by the regular movement of the ball. She was having religious fits again. Jesus Christ, she thought, how many thousands of years will it take people to get over their folklore?

It's really sad for me that in the United States the Latino community is losing its culture and language, especially among kids born here - a lot of them can't even speak our language.

Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.

Adivasi societies are not fossilized societies.

One could well ask if there is some subconscious link in the patriarchal mind between the agni-pariksha, fire-ordeal of Sita; the encouraging of women to become satis, the practice of entering the fire jointly in a jauhar when a Rajput raja was defeated in a campaign; and the frequency of dowry deaths in recent times.

Historically the interesting question is when and why did the prohibition on eating beef become the requirement of a good Hindu.

The third aspect was that Hindu society has always been divided into four main castes—the varnas.

When I celebrated my bar mitzvah, there was no cake. Today, there is no such thing as a bar mitzvah in the United States without a special cake. It can be even more complicated and expensive than a wedding cake, because bar-mitzvah cakes are often based on a particular theme.

Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.

To me, to be a conservative means to conserve the good parts of America and to conserve our Constitution.

Giving up on the ancient tradition of trusting in the god-kings for protection and sustenance is the real challenge.

Superstitions are just coincidence or ignorance.

We are reformers in the spring, but iin autumn we stand by the old. Ralph Waldo Emerson

What are this blind dates?' he asked curiously . 'An old American institution of mismating.

The other form of genuine connection is more general, and best explained by reversing the traditional metaphor of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. During the past fifty years, as described, a lot of babies have been removed from the bathwater of primeval seasonal festivity, in the shape of customs which proved to be a lot less old than had previously been supposed.

You know, it was only a generation ago that actors couldn't be buried in the churchyard.

Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas.

he spoke of what he called the "inner history of weakness, of what disappoints us in leaders, the timidity of thought, the hesitancy and the drift." In these cases imagination and will are often blinded by "constructed evils," he wrote. "We falter from childhood amidst shames and fears, we move in closed spaces where stale tradition enervates, we grow hysterical over success and failure, and so by surrounding instinct with terror, we prepare the soul for weakness.

Even the most traditional Indians, the ones who'd kept the old ceremonies alive in secret, either had Catholicism beaten into them in boarding school...or they had decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe.