Quotes About Tradition

The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.

Espresso is to Italy, what champagne is to France.

The president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, Charles William Eliot, thought that ball-carriers in football ought not search for holes in the line that could lead to gaudy breakaway runs, but should do the modest, gentlemanly thing and plow headfirst into the nearest man-pile. (Eliot also didn't like baseball because he believed curveballs and other deceptive pitches to be unsportsmanlike.)

Who are you writing to, Linus?" "This is the time of year to write to the Great Pumpkin. On Halloween Night, the Great Pumpkin rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with his bag of toys for all the children!" "You must be crazy! When are you going to stop believing in something that isn't true?" "When *you* stop believing in that fellow with a red suit and the white beard who goes, 'Ho, ho, ho!'" "We're obviously separated by denominational differences.

LINUS: Where are you going for Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown? CHARLIE: My father, my mother, Sally, and I are all going to my grandmothers for dinner. SALLY: Do you want to come too, Linus? We can hold hands under the table. LINUS: BLECH!

Grownups are the ones who puzzle me at Christmastime...Who, but a grownup, would ruin a beautiful holiday season for himself by suddenly attempting to correspond with four hundred people he doesn't see all year?

If manhood is passed down, if it is a mantle cut from the cloth of one and draped across another, it is not done so using titles or accolades. Not hardly. It occurs there—in that spout now resting neck-high—pouring down the spine and into the belly in a language that has never been transcribed, but that every boy on the planet understands and has always understood.

That was the night I learned the value of an old hymn. How something so old and "out-of-date" could say words my heart needed to hear and didn't know how to say.

And they ate supper before they said grace.

Anytime you start singing Johnny Cash, you're walking on hallowed ground.

But good hymns? They live past the people who wrote them. Hymns never die.

That was the night I learned the value of an old hymn. How something so old and "out-of-date" could say words my heart needed to hear and didn't know how to say.

Here, I put it as an assertion: If the criteria for the choice are rootedness in human experience, seriousness of purpose, and intellectual depth, choosing the classic aesthetic tradition over postmodernism is not a close call.

the most lovable of exceptional American qualities (is) our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren't, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.

The perfect Christmas tree? All Christmas trees are perfect!

It was in America that Santa put on weight.

I like the streets of New York City, where I was born,better than these streets of palms.No doubt, my father liked his village in Ukrainiabetter than the streets of New York City;and my grandfather the city and its synagogue,where he once read aloud the holy books,better than the villagein which he dickered in the market-place.

I have learnt the Hebrew blessing before eating bread;is there no blessing before reading Hebrew?

I come from a long line of generations!

Christmas: the one time of year when you can't avoid the nuts in your family muesli.

Maybe some find that so, but Joseph Sobran better expresses my feelings: "It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up."1

A grown person in Tahiti has an eating hour allotted to him twice a day, at 10 A.M. and 5 P.M.