Quotes About Customs

Noblemen are almost the only people who can teach you as much as peasants; their conversation is adorned with everything that concerns the land, dwellings as people used to live in them in the past, old customs, everything about which the moneyed world is profoundly ignorant.

O tempora! O mores! [Oh the times! The customs!]

But marrying within one's own family can get monotonous. One has heard all the same family stories, knows all the jokes and all the same recipes. No novelty.

Adult Mohaves encouraged the young to indulge themselves sexually while they could, so that by their mid-teens, they were jaded

It is curious to observe how customs and ceremonies degenerate.

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.

Cantonese will eat anything in the sky but airplanes, anything in the sea but submarines, and anything with four legs but the table.

I think a person who arranges the event and orders the food also picks up the check - even the birthday person, even when people at the table insist on paying for the birthday person.

No rule of etiquette is of less importance than which fork we use.

Hot soup at table is very vulgar; it either leads to an unseemly mode of taking it, or keeps people waiting too long whilst it cools. Soup should be brought to table only moderately warm.

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #10: WHEN VISITING A FOREIGN LAND, IT IS ALWAYS WISE TO OBSERVE AND ABIDE BY THE CUSTOMS OF THE LOCAL CULTURE. UNLESS THEY'RE TRYING TO EAT YOU.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.

When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, 'Well, what do you need?'

The hair is the richest ornament of women. Of old, virgins used to wear it loose, except when they were in mourning.

I was raised in the Jewish tradition, taught never to marry a Gentile woman, shave on a Saturday night and, most especially, never to shave a Gentile woman on a Saturday night.

Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.

He politely breathed up my nose. I had learned many years ago that this is the preferred greeting of most horses. They like to breathe up your nose. Especially when you're first introduced. And then, to be polite, you must breathe back up theirs.

Taboo is not a word considered with any seriousness in the Old World.

Across many parts of the Western world, salt and pepper shakers take up a prominent space on kitchen and dining room tables. As everyone knows, most are uniform in appearance: three pinprick holes on the saltshaker, and a single one atop the pepper. If you live in Asia, however, the number of holes is reversed, with three on the pepper shaker and one on the saltshaker, thanks to the popularity of pepper in Asian countries and the cultural preference for soy sauce. This

In the eyes of the world nothing is holy except what departs as much as possible from the usual customs of life.

it is easy to imagine the widespread pleasure when in 167 BCE Rome became a tax-free state: the treasury was so overflowing – thanks, in particular, to the spoils from the recent victory over Macedon – that direct taxation of Roman citizens was suspended except in emergencies, although they remained liable to a range of other levies, such as customs dues or a special tax charged on freeing slaves.