Quotes About Tradition

I think the British have the distinction above all other nations of being able to put new wine into old bottles without bursting them.

The British love permanence more than they love beauty.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions but religiously follows the new.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.

There are two kinds of fools: one says, 'This is old, therefore it is good'; the other says, 'This is new, therefore it is better.'

Friends and wine should be old.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

Custom is second nature, and no less powerful.

Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional forms and ceremonies.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

In some remote regions of Islam it is said, a woman caught unveiled by a stranger will raise her skirt to cover her face.

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous by simple repetition ceases to be miraculous.

The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement.

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

Custom, that unwritten law, By which the people keep even kings in awe.

The gnarled fidelity of an old habit.

The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.

He's a chip o' th' old block.

A people without history is like wind on the buffalo grass.

When the Quaker Penn kept his hat on in the royal presence, Charles (King Charles II) politely removed his, explaining that it was the custom in that place for only one person at a time to remain covered.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.