Quotes About Tradition

Art outlasts individual whim, family pride, society's orthodoxy; art always has time on its side.

Sex as civic duty? I thought, somehow, this was very Dutch. Also, sort of adorable.

There is a strong tradition in the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth of artists seeing marriage as the enemy of art. Love, yes; marriage, no. Flaubert took the wedding of any literary friend as a personal betrayal, and beyond that, a betrayal of their shared art.

Professional critics] act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of course, it's her house, and everybody is living in it rent free, but even so, surely it is, well, you know… time?

Grace, as her mother had repeatedly told her, was very much second son material.

When I was young, men like my father would often come home and put on their smoking jacket over their perfectly ordinary trousers, as a way of relaxing in the evening.

Perhaps men like the Everseas were commonplace here in England. Perhaps finding a beautiful titled husband would be as simple as shaking an apple from a tree.

Czechoslovakian

Madelyne, we're married now. 'Tis a usual occurrence to bed one's wife on the wedding night.

Judaism offered no Shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn...no injunction against listening to music or going to work.

For nearly a week I neither cooked nor grocery shopped. Instead, all of our various families took Eric and me out for Mexican food, for barbecue, for beignets. We ate cheese biscuits with Rice Krispies, and spiced pecans, and red beans and rice, and gumbo, and all those other things that New Yorkers would turn up their noses at, but New Yorkers don't know everything, do they? This is what Texas, and family, are for.

This is a—a proposal of marriage?" he asked me, and there was the very smallest trace of a smile at the corner of his mouth, something I had never seen before. "I suppose so," I said, blushing again. "And, as you see, I'm doing it properly, on my knees." "This would, however, be a partnership of equals you're offering, I imagine?" "Undoubtedly." (448-49)

It was quiet; so quiet. Didn't these people know how to grieve for a good man? Didn't they know how to weep, and scream with rage, and curse the powers of darkness in their sorrow? Didn't they know how to hold one another, and dry one another's tears, and tell tales of the things he had done, and of what he had been, to see him safe on his way? Where were the great fires, and the toasts in strong ale, and the scent of burning juniper?

Seven years of this and I'll have lost whatever edge I once had, I said. I'll have turned into one of those well-fed countrywomen who pride themselves on making better preserves then their neighbors, and give all their chickens names.

When the Fair Folk gave you an instruction, you followed it, whether it suited you or not. That was just the way it was.

Your kind have forgotten the old ways," says Eirne. "You have forgotten the importance of the tales, the wisdom of the past, the strength that rises from tree and stone and stream, the bond between one world and the other.

History is precious; ritual is precious. Lose that and we lose the knowledge of our own being, Lose the thread of ancestry, lose the tales, and we are adrift without identity.

My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.

This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.

There is a superior unity of all those who despite all, fight in different parts of the world the same battle, lead the same revolt, and are the bearers of the same intangible Tradition. These forces appear to be scattered and isolated in the world, and yet are inexorably connected by a common essence that is meant to preserve the absolute ideal of the Imperium and to work for its return.

I know few greater pleasures than holding a lacquer soup bowl in my hands, feeling upon my palms the weight of the liquid and its mild warmth. The sensation is something like that of holding a plump newborn baby.

I know of few greater pleasures than holding a lacquer soup bowl in my hands, feeling upon my palms the weight of the liquid and its mild warmth. The sensation is something like that of holding a plump newborn baby.

Während die Abendländer den Schmutz radikal aufzudecken und zu entfernen trachten, konservieren ihn die Ostasiaten sorgfältig und ästhetisieren ihn, so wie er ist - könnte man, wenn man wollte, beschönigend sagen; aber wie auch immer, es ist unser Schicksal, dass wir nun einmal Dinge mit Spuren von Menschenhänden, Lampenruß, Wind und Regen lieben oder auch daran erinnernde Farbtönungen und Lichtwirkungen.

According to tradition, my great-grandfather married early, at 14, with a woman six years older. It was considered to be one of the duties of the wife to raise her husband.