Quotes About Tradition

One of the stranger things about me is that I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. I went to a yeshiva until I was thirteen years old and spoke fluent Hebrew.

We were very rich culturally. One Sunday each month, we would do this thing called Chamber Pots at somebody's house. A classical music group would come over and we'd have dinner. There were thirty people - parents and kids - and we'd sit on the floor and listen to this beautiful music.

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

I want to share music that we grew up with for this generation, the music my parents shared with me.

My grandparents and my mom prayed the rosary a lot, and later in life, I had a priest friend of mine teach me centering prayer, based on Father Thomas Keating's work. That led to practicing different kinds of meditation off and on as I got older.

I'm a junior, so my dad's name is Thomas Rhett Akins as well. So literally, from the day I was born, it was Thomas Rhett. It wasn't Thomas or Rhett, it was Thomas Rhett.

Home cooks are finding inspiration in the past, digging up centuries-old recipes more familiar to the likes of Thomas Jefferson than Thomas Keller.

I don't want the sort of funeral that everybody else has, but there is one hymn, a good Protestant hymn, and it is sung at all Protestant funerals, and I think I should have it sung at mine. It is called 'The Day Thou Gave Us Lord is Ended'.

I like being Jewish and I married a Jewish girl. It's like a way of life and it's good to be able to instil some of that sense of being in your kids. All of that makes me seem as though I am quite observant but actually the flipside of this is I don't know if there is a God or not.

What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done?

Though I'm not religious in the classical sense I did partake in Passover.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

We grew up Amish, but my parents left the religion when I was a child. The Amish have lots of rules, and my dad thought many people in the faith were hypocritical because they'd tell others not to do something and then do it themselves.

Punjabi culture is very strong and we have thousand of stories, which can be turned into films to keep our generations rooted in the culture.

It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.

To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.

Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's.

Heirlooms we don't have in our family. But stories we've got.

I bambini ancora in vestaglia arrivano come uccelli sotto il grande abete illuminato, luccica il laghetto di vetro del presepio. Natale splende con mille candeline negli occhi, nell'oro e nel rosso della carte colorate. La felicità si brucia le ali credendo di far luce.

Christmas works like glue, it keeps us all sticking together.

The church bell was ringing, three unvarying insistent peals, 'Come to church, come to church,' that punctuated every Sunday.

Historians now agree that, relatively speaking, the years 1000 to 1300 in Europe—the period traditionally called the "High Middle Ages"—were prosperous and productive.

Top hats and frock coats were by 1863 a distinctly modern costume. The top hat had been invented in 1797 by the London haberdasher John Hetherington, who caused a riot when he stepped outside with one perched on his head: children screamed, women fainted, the arm of an errand boy was broken, and Hetherington was hauled before the courts to explain the meaning of his alarming new invention.

The tea tasted like a clear dark dripping from the past. My grandmother came back with it, in crisp black funeral silks