Quotes About Tradition

The notion of a Judeo-Christian tradition, he says, is a myth invented by Enlightenment humanists to promote pluralistic social values.

Etsuko was given the name Esther by her teacher, Mr. Slater, on her first day of school. "It's his mother's name," she explained. To which we replied, "So is yours.

Where to start, Fitger thought. The department was a funhouse of dysfunctional characters. Academia was, traditionally, a refuge for the poorly socialized and the obsessive; but English, at Payne, had a higher percentage of crackpots than most.

my father says, stirring the soup that he's concocted: tuna and pepperoni in a chicken broth.

My mother was born on a tiny farm in County Mayo. She was meant to stay at home and look after the farm while her brother and sister got an education. However, she came to England on a visit and never went back.

You were rightly destined for our family, Catherine. Almost by instinct you seem to have stumbled on the old tradition by which the châtelaines of Montsalvy would go to Puy, in times of war and danger, to implore divine help and offer their most beautiful jewels to the Madonna. Go, my daughter, you think as a true Montsalvy would!

Esta danza recibe el nombre de «Alegría de los famas».

Kinder sollen nie Wein trinken. (Außer an Neujahr; dann sollen sie saufen.)

Kingship was the supreme form of government, and was believed to be in the natural order of things. It did not need physical strength to assert itself, and when it did, it was only sporadically. It imposed itself mainly and irresistibly through the spirit.

Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and antihistorical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their "truths" and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.

The hands of the latest aristocrats seem better fit to hold tennis rackets or shakers for cocktail mixes than swords or scepter.

A political, economic, and social order created merely for the sake of temporal life is exclusively characteristic of the modern world, that is, of the antitraditional world.

With respect to modern civilisation and society, it may indeed be said that nothing possesses a more revolutionary character than Tradition, which — in proper and Hegelian terms — constitutes the 'negation of a negation': for the latter is what, through 'progress', has desecrated everything and subverted every normal order, leading us to the state we find ourselves in today.

Jokingly, I once said that beside 'Evolians' [...] we now also have 'Evolomaniacs'. Similar phenomena are inevitable. Interview 6 - 1972

T]he proud self-assurance with which traditional man reacted valiantly and superindividually against the unrighteous, armed with faith and the sword, and the spiritual impassibility that placed him in an a prior, absolute relation to a supernatural power not subject to the power of the elements, sensations, and natural laws-all these things have come to be considered mere 'superstitions.

We, in Africa, have no more need of being 'converted' to socialism than we have of being 'taught' democracy. Both are rooted in our past -- in the traditional society which produced us.

A nation which refuses to learn from foreign culture is nothing but a nation of idiots and lunatics... But to learn from other cultures does not mean we should abandon our own.

For a woman who lived in the dark it was enough if she had a faint, white face —a full body was unnecessary.

Our cooking depends upon shadows and is inseparable from darkness

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

But her greatest assets were her bound feet, called in Chinese "three-inch golden lilies" (san-tsun-gin-lian). This meant she walked "like a tender young willow shoot in a spring breeze," as Chinese connoisseurs of women traditionally put it. The sight of a woman teetering on bound feet was supposed to have an erotic effect on men, partly because her vulnerability induced a feeling of protectiveness in the onlooker.

The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.

I mean, shit, what Latino family doesn't think it's cursed?

It was the curse that made me do it, you know. I don't believe in that sh*t, Oscar. That's our parents' sh*t. It's ours, too, he said.