Quotes About Tradition

We change the script a little," Madame Ping said, "to allow for cultural differences. But the story never changes. There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories.

Coals gleamed in the hearth and the air was fragrant with pine branches, frankincense, and lapsang souchong tea. It was New Year's Day.

We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition.

My mum,' Thomas Kintry told him, 'when she gets really down, she churns over the past. All the things she thinks she did wrong, all the people she let down. There was this one Christmas when the turkey came out too dry; she still goes on about that bloody turkey, what a miserable Christmas day it was. And this is, like—1993 or something. But she still goes on about it. My nan was the same.

The problem comes when religion enters the science classroom. There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling preachers what to teach. Scientists don't picket churches. By and large—though it may not look this way today—science and religion have achieved peaceful coexistence for quite some time. In fact, the greatest conflicts in the world are not between religion and science; they're between religion and religion.

So how do you feel about it?" "I'm not upset, but my mom was crying and it's the first time I've ever seen her cry. Dad always wanted whiskey poured on his grave, so my brother said, 'I just hope he doesn't mind me filtering it through my bladder first.'" Mystery

marriage was an obsolete institution.

Legalism is alive and well in many of our churches.

Daughters of the American Revolution don't have group sex because they don't want to have to write all those thank-you notes.

Do you know why Italians don't like Jehovah's Witnesses?" "No… why?" "Italians don't like any witnesses.

He said, The spring was good enough for their mothers and their grandmothers before them. They will get ideas above their station in life if they have a well. She

Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture

Technologies come and go. The world remains a world of squares and towers.

The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common.

The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe the smiles off European faces.

Everything that occurs in the world, in every epoch, has something that corresponds to it in ancient times.

men live peacefully as long as their old way of life is maintained and there is no change in customs.

In India, a bride burning-- to punish a woman for inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry-- takes place approximately once every two hours, but rarely constitute news.

Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.

Culture, of course, is an extremely vague word, covering everything from the shaping of hand-axes to corporate mission statements, as well as the finer appreciation of the sonnets of Shakespeare and the paintings of Hokusai;

As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories.

Languages make possible both the living of a common history, and also the telling of it.

The period which this Chapter covers witnessed the dawn of a revolution in Western worship – the introduction of musical instruments. As we saw in Volume One, the early Church did not use instruments in its worship, regarding them as Jewish or Pagan, but not part of the apostolic tradition of Christian worship.

Even his highly emotional Italian mother didn't believe that true love could blossom overnight. Like his brothers and sisters-in-law, she wanted nothing more for him than to marry and start a family, but if he showed up at her doorstep and said that he'd met someone two days ago and knew she was the one for him, his mother would smack him with a broom, curse in Italian, and drag him to church, sure that he had some serious sins that needed confessing.