Quotes About Customs

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

Food is a lens for culture.

I don't understand why they keep forks and spoons on the table while serving biryani. You are supposed to eat it with your hand, and I prefer it that way.

We don't do funerals in my family.

Natale con i tuoi, Pasqua con chi vuoi—Christmas with your own, Easter with whomever you wish.

Never smoke another man's pipe.

mountain peak soared against the sky. "That's El Yunque—The Anvil," Jack pointed out. "It's a tropical rain forest with ferns as high as houses." They landed and admired the large white modernistic terminal building as they walked toward it. The structure seemed to be poised on stilts. Mr. Hardy was waiting to greet the travelers as soon as they cleared customs. "Good flight?" he asked.

I requested the gentlemen to put on their hats, and the ladies their shawls, to avoid catching cold, and then had the windows widely opened. This proceeding caused some astonishment and alarm at first; for the Americans generally have a dread of cold air.

My unrealized ambition is to tend my vines, produce wine, and work like an artisan. I dream of rediscovering the old traditions and customs of wine growing, not necessarily to deny the technology which we have today, but to harness it and work in harmony with nature.

My first trip to Japan, in 1998, began with an enormous crowd of Japanese paparazzi and television crews, all waiting for me to clear customs in Tokyo (a first-time experience for this wine critic). Over the next five days, the attention never waned.

On Christmas Eve, we have a duck or roast pork with caramelised potatoes, braised red cabbage and gravy. For dessert, we have ris a l'amande, a rice pudding, and whoever gets the whole almond in it wins an extra present. Then we dance around the tree and sing carols.

When I go to different countries, I want to know how to at least say hello and thank you. Language is a great hobby.

The first thing the Chinese ask you when they meet you is: 'How much money do you make?' It's a legitimate question to ask in China.

Well, the most important thing about Islam is that we have to differentiate between two kinds of Islam. The first one is the institution of Islam... second, the culture of Islam.

The disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours'. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home.

She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn't something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.

The other form of genuine connection is more general, and best explained by reversing the traditional metaphor of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. During the past fifty years, as described, a lot of babies have been removed from the bathwater of primeval seasonal festivity, in the shape of customs which proved to be a lot less old than had previously been supposed.

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives.

Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.

A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity; nor is that curiosity ever more agreeably or usefully employed, than in examining the laws and customs of foreign nations.

He has travelled. But is not human nature the same in every country, allowing only for different customs? — Do not Love, hatred, anger, malice, all the passions in short, good or bad, shew themselves by like effects in the faces, hearts,  and actions of the people of every country?

I pick up my cutlery: fork in my left hand, knife in my right -- European-style, like my mother.

One of the French officers was horrified that at a dinner in Washington's tent, His Excellency served the meal not in a succession of courses like in civilization. Apparently Washington "gave, on the same plate, meat, vegetables, and salad." On the same plate? Were these Americans people or animals?

one learns that his bed was so short because most people back then slept sitting up;