Quotes About Tradition

The youth of America is their oldest tradition.

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern.  One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly. 

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. Whatever influence I ever had over mamma, I lost at the age of three.

His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.

Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry. Except in America, rejoined Lord Henry, languidly.

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grandperes ont toujours tort.

No son of mine should ever take the side of the Puritans: that is always an error.

In my time, of course, we were taught not to understand anything. That was the old system, and wonderfully interesting it was. I assure you that the amount of things I and my poor dear sister were taught not to understand was quite extraordinary.

What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. 

No one cares about distant relatives nowadays. They went out of fashion years ago.

Seven fine broads are at his side. They sing songs of the Mexican Revolution which they learned from their grandmothers

One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but 'progress' — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.

In place of a true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman...

Nothing is stronger than Custom (Fac tibi consuescat: nil adsuetudine maius)

they cast the stones behind: The stones (a miracle to mortal view, But long tradition makes it pass for true) Did first the rigour of their kind expel, And suppled into softness, as they fell

Aye, wumman, if it's truly romantic, then it must be Scottish

Hypatia, like all girls who intend to be good wives, made it a practice to look on any suggestions thrown out by her future lord and master as fatuous and futile.

he had put it in the hands of a young man who in all his life had only once shown genuine inspiration and initiative – on the occasion when he had parted his hair in the middle at a time when all the other members of the Bachelors' Club were brushing it straight back.

Celestine had been born Maggie O'Toole, a name which Mrs. Pett stoutly refused to countenance in any maid of hers.

You could tell it was classical, because the banjo players were leaning back and chewing gum; and in New York restaurants only death or a classical speciality can stop banjoists.

A breezy disregard for the preservation of the pence was a family trait.

Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.

Potato salad in the South is nothing less than the principal smuggler of cholesterol into the festive, careless heart. It is pure poison beneath the facade of bland puritan propriety. It is the food of choice at any food banquet of smiling relatives who celebrate tacitly among themselves the dark twining of two of their promising youth.