Quotes About Tradition

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. they may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. the great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. if they fall short, society stagnates. if they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity.

China produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation.

The leaders on both sides of the Pacific have an obligation to establish a tradition of consultation and mutual respect so that, for their successors, jointly building a shared world order becomes an expression of parallel national aspirations.

continuous revolution had three sources: ideology, tradition, and Chinese nationalism.

Culture is "lived religion". It is the form that religion takes in the lives of men.

Culture is a sacred activity, an exercise in the sphere of religion.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their old, familiar carols play, And wild and sweet The words repeat Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.

The shore was God, the stream was tradition, and the oars were the free will given to me to make it to the shore where I would be joined with God. Thus the force of life was renewed within me, and I began to live once again.

For love? What antediluvian notions you have! Can one talk of love in these days?" said the ambassador's wife. "What's to be done? It's a foolish old fashion that's kept up still," said Vronsky.

He spoke that refined French in which our grandparents not only spoke bit thought...

Sight-seeing, aside from the fact that everything had been seen already, could not have for him--and intelligent Russian--the inexplicable importance attached to it by the English.

I united myself with my forefathers: the father, mother, and grandparents I loved. They and all my predecessors believed and lived, and they produced me.

Never had I heard from my elders that what I thus did was bad. It is true that there are the ten commandments of the Bible; but the commandments are made only to be recited before the priests at examinations, and even then are not as exacting as the commandments in regard to the use of ut in conditional propositions.

The danger lies not in the imaginary hydra of revolution, but in a stubborn traditionalism that impedes progress.

Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.

The old with the old, the young with the young, the hostess by the tea table, on which there were exactly the same cakes in a silver basket as the Panins had at their soiree - everything was exactly the same as with everyone else.

That's how it's always done with us, all the wrong way round!' the Russian officers and generals said after the battle of Tarutino, just as people speak now, letting it be felt that some fool somewhere does things that way, the wrong way round, but we would not do things that way. But people who talk like that either do not know what they are talking about or are deliberately deceiving themselves.

Anna married an older man of position, as young women had done for centuries before and continue to do now.

Every Russian received the name of one of the saints in the Church calendar, and that saint's day was his or her name day and was kept much as a birthday is kept in England and the United States.—A.M.

So much the worse for those who follow the fashion. The only happy marriages I know are marriages of convenience." "Yes, but then how often the happiness of the convenient marriages flies away like dust just because that passion turns up that they have refused to recognize," said Vronsky.

In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.

The questions that we must ask ourselves, and that our historians and our children will ask of us, are these: How will what we create compare with what we inherited? Will we add to our tradition or will we subtract from it? Will we enrich it or will we deplete it?