Quotes About Tradition

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.

The faith I was born into formed me.

Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for 'art,' because for Indians everything is art.

The future of Conservatism lies in our beliefs and values, not by throwing them away. We need to shed associations that bind us to past failures, but hold faith with those things that make us Conservatives.

Two of its members, Rodrigo de Jerez and the interpreter Luis de Torres, had even gone so far as to try the custom for themselves, thus becoming the first Europeans to smoke tobacco.

Luego está la ración. España es el único sitio del universo, si no me equivoco, donde la gente come antes de irse a casa a comer. Me parece genial.

Legends should stay legends otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend.

West-central Fife could use a spot of communion itself. It would drink the wine and pawn the chalice.

Scotsman's way of dealing with death. He'd found

The democratic tradition offers better resources than the going alternatives for ensuring that political claims and counter-claims are tested for their veracity in the public arena, and for protecting those individual rights that best embody the aspiration for human freedom.

We tend to take what is familiar for what is natural

some current controversies are caused, or at least stoked, by a reluctance to abandon received ideas that may well have outlived their usefulness.

A man without tattoos is invisible to the Gods.

My father told us stories about our ancestors and about the city and how we should act. He told us that the four sins are wine, women, wealth, and wrath.

Few things are more absurd than wise saws originally designed to inculcate or maintain the social needs of a society long past - when they are applied to today.

Sufism, the "secret tradition," is not available on the basis of assumptions which belong to another world, the world of intellect.

Inheritance and culture obscure people's higher capacities.

As the Eastern saying, by the sage Hilali, has it, 'one person who understands is worth a hundred who merely obey a custom.

You may have forgotten the Way: But those who came before Did not forget you. Saying of Master Bahaudin Naqshband of Bokhara

The practice of the Sufis is too sublime to have a formal beginning

Much religious teaching in the world is in reality a confused or deteriorated form, very different from its roots.

What you are pleased to call Sufism is merely the record of past method.

Como dice el refrán oriental del sabio Hilali, 'una persona que entiende vale más que cien que meramente obedecen a una costumbre.