Quotes About Tradition

Unless you have singing in the family and singing in the house, singing everywhere, until it becomes a habit, you never can have congregational singing; it will be the cold drops, half water, half ice, which drip in March from some cleft of rock, one drop here and another there; whereas it should be like the August shower, which comes ten million drops at once, and roars on the roof.

The books we are required to teach frequently have nothing to do with anything except the fact that they have always been taught, or that there is an oversupply of them, or that some committee or other was asked to come up with some titles.

Poet W.S. Merwin once mused that in order to adequately describe the forests of eastern Pennsylvania where he grew up, he'd "have to speak in a forgotten language." He was aware that a shift in consciousness is necessary for certain forms of communication and that it's easy to lose ancient languages we've long ceased to practice. How, then, do we speak of the languages that we may need in renewing the Great Conversation?

The young adults of the time and their parents and pundits all wrung their hands. But they needn't have. "Those who did best tended to accept change, not to berate themselves for breaking with tradition."41

Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have left the vulgar stuff alone.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

For a certain generation of African immigrants cleaning offices became part of the culture like male circumcision and supporting Arsenal.

Fish and chip night was a Kumar family tradition that dated back to when Jaget was courting his wife and they used to meet in the last white English-owned fish and chip shop in Wembley on the basis that none of their relatives would go in there. "It

God bless busybody community matriarchs, and all that sail in them.

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.

could come to terms with aspects of my past without those terms being set by the Foundation's unexamined Freudian tradition, which pathologized women's experience when it didn't fit the great man's theory.

The stars dehisce. By "stars" I mean, of course, tradition , and by "tradition" I mean nothing at all. A pronoun disembowels his antecedent. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Maurice Oldfield, the most senior spy in Britain, signed himself "C," in green ink, a practice first adopted by the founder of MI6, Mansfield Cumming, who imported it from the Royal Navy, where ships' captains customarily write in green ink.

The past that Southerners are forever talking about is not a dead past--it is a chapter from the legend that our kinfolks have told us, it is a living past, living for a reason. The past is a part of the present, it is a comfort, a guide, a lesson.

Properly cared for, a Savile Row suit can be handed down the generations—like gout.

Voltaire, Kant, Bentham—all assumed that reason could construct morality from scratch. But their moralities did not coincide. Practically speaking, their morality lifted elements, even if unconsciously, from the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek telos they suggested they had exploded.

If we try to engineer outcomes, if we overturn tradition to make everyone the same, we ruin society. If we upset tradition to allow for an equal shot at the starting gate, everyone wins, except for the charlatans and would be dictators.

What is meant by the deposit? That which is committed to you, not that which is invented by you; that which you have received, not that which you have devised; a thing not of wit but of learning; not of private assumption but of public tradition; a thing brought to you, not brought forth from you; thus you must not be an author, but an authorized keeper; not a leader but a follower. Keep the deposit."509

Conservative" means maintaining the status quo, and I think the status quo stinks.

The girls Have the brief-blooming, rhododendron-youth Of pioneer women, and the black-toothed age. And if you yearn to meet your pioneers, You'll find them there, the same men, inbred sons Of inbred sires perhaps, but still the same; A pioneer-island in a world that has No use for pioneers--the unsplit rock Of Fundamentalism, calomel, Clan-virtues, clannish vices, fiddle-tunes And a harsh God.

My grandfather was a lawyer, my dad was a lawyer, my mum was a lawyer, I got an uncle who's a lawyer, I got cousins that are lawyers.

aceite juntó su pringosa suavidad con la acritud astringente del vino, y batidos y juntados sellaron el pacto, cuando los dedos gordezuelos de Nazaria vendaban aquella frente merecedora del yugo para tirar de un arado.

Subsistirán las corridas de toros mientras exista en el alma española propensión a la alegría. El día que no haya toros los españoles tendrán que inventarlos

Oh, señora condesa, parece que ha adivinado usted mi pensamiento! Como usted, yo he observado la corrupción de las costumbres, hija de la desenvoltura francesa; como usted, he observado el descuido de las madres, la ceguera de los padres, la malicia de las tías, la complicidad de las primas y la debilidad de las abuelas; y he dicho: «orden, rigor, cautela, reclusión, tiranía, o si no dentro de poco la sociedad se precipitará en los abismos del pecado».