Quotes About Customs

Every country has its sacred culture.

It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose.

Second.—The Christian is to walk singularly, not after the world's guise, Rom. 12:2. We are commanded not to be conformed to this world, that is, not to accommodate ourselves to the corrupt customs of the world.

The "olden times" are only such in reference to us. The past is rendered strange, mysterious, visionary, awful from this great gap in time that parts us from it, and the long perspective of waning years. Things gone by and almost forgotten, look dim and dull, uncouth and quaint, from our ignorance of them, and the mutability of customs. But in their day—they were fresh, unimpaired, in full vigour, familiar and glossy.

In time freed from public fornication, the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were occupied in killing one another in tavern brawls or over tavern wenches; at the dinner table, lacking access to the fork, they used their knives to settle slights as well as scores.33

Whatever the muddy reality, the image of Dublin as an undefiled community of Norman/English families who had settled in the twelfth century, married amongst their own and upheld English law, customs and orthodox religion, was a compelling story.

When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking "three paternosters," or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.

Morality and immorality are not defined by man's changing attitudes and social customs. They are determined by the God of the universe, whose timeless standards cannot be ignored with impunity.

It would be nice if people said, God bless you not just when you sneezed but also when you farted.

Thank God we're going to try to continue and effectively defend our frontiers with the Border Patrol, with the Customs Department, with the Coast Guard, with the Armed Forces.

An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath.

This sign I give you: every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights.

Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.

The soul is subject to health and disease, just as is the body. The health and disease of both . . . undoubtedly depend upon beliefs and customs, which are peculiar to mankind.

We have a pride of who we are as Latinos, regardless if we're Puerto Rican, Dominican, Venezuelan, and we're very proud of our customs and our history and our traditions and who we are.

Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the nineteenth century.

It is also absolutely correct that some British folk customs have descended directly from pagan rituals, such ... the giving of presents and decoration of homes with greenery at midwinter.

Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.

You have your own culture and your own ways of doing things. I hope Japan continues on this path.

I enjoy bathing, as many Europeans don't.

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.

The face of the dead man was concealed, of course, our customs not being those of the south, where corpses are carried to the grave in open coffins, that they might – one last time before slipping into the pit – be warmed by the light of the sun.