Quotes About Tradition

The Sama Veda of India contains the world's earliest writings on musical science. The

Because it is a formal order, with an unbroken line of saintly representatives serving as active leaders, no man can give himself the title of swami. He rightfully receives it only from another swami; all monks thus trace their spiritual lineage to one common guru, Lord Shankara. By vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the spiritual teacher, many Catholic Christian monastic orders resemble the Order of Swamis.

There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere.

Societies have religion because social cohesion requires something like religion. Social groups would fall apart if ritual did not periodically reestablish that all members are part of a greater whole.

Elinor retreated to the terrace where the night air on her skin felt like a hot bath. She was hurt, it had been such an onslaught. All the things she'd achieved in the past four years, the independent life she'd built for herself, seemed to count for nothing here. The only thing that mattered to her mother was finding a husband. As for painting, well, nice little hobby, very suitable, but you won't have much time for that when the children arrive.

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn't easy.

The human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them.

It's the southern way, Doctor." "The southern way?" she said. "My mother's immortal phrase. We laugh when the pain gets too much. We laugh when the pity of human life gets too . . . pitiful. We laugh when there's nothing else to do." "When do you weep . . . according to the southern way?" "After we laugh, Doctor. Always. Always after we laugh.

I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

My mother's family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, "He was named after the prophet Jerry Mire.

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.

Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science.

The South's got a lot wrong with it. But it's permanent press and it doesn't wash out.

The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. It is admired only if it's done in silence.

The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. Sorrow is admired only if it's done in silence.

La manière sudiste? dit-elle. - L'immortelle expression chère à ma mère. Nous rions quand la douleur se fait trop forte. Nous rions quand la pitié de l'humaine condition devient trop pitoyable. Nous rions quand il n'y a rien d'autre à faire.

Every time I eat grits, it becomes perfectly clear to me why the South lost the war.

pervasive part of the island culture

Change comes hard, because we find nothing more traditional than traditions. We put so much effort into designing and building these hierarchies that we are tremendously resistant to rethinking them in spite of the pressure to do so.

Chapter 2 The Big Woods Back in Wisconsin, Laura looked forward to a treat that came just once a year: roasted pig tail!

It was customary for the uncle of the groom to hide a bowl of sheep's blood in the marriage hut. If the bride was not a virgin, the groom could stain her white body-garment and show it to the wedding party. In this way he saved face and spared his wife's life.

All the different Soninke clans—the Sisse, Kante, Sylla, and others—trace their ancestry to Dinga's sons and daughters.