Quotes About Customs

You don't take food home from restaurants in Sweden.

The Germans and Austrians are very polite, the Swiss are very reserved and the Spanish usually kiss me. The Brits write me letters.

People crown kings and queens at homecoming parades all the time. We do a lot of things in our society that are simply symbolic.

Culture can be invisible to its natives.

It is useful to know something of the manners of different nations, that we may be enabled to form a more correct judgment regarding our own, and be prevented from thinking that everything contrary to our customs is ridiculous and irrational, a conclusion usually come to by those whose experience has been limited to their own country.

It is good to know something of the customs of different people in order to judge more soundly of our own, and so that we might not think that all that which is contrary to our own ways be ridiculous and contrary to reason, as those who have seen nothing have the habit of doing.

She still called it dinner, although the vicar had tried to educate her for years that the working classes had their dinner at midday, but the upper classes had luncheon.

John Barclay has well summarized the ethical issue at stake: "The problem here is not legalism (in the sense of earning merit before God) but cultural imperialism—regarding Jewish identity and Jewish customs as the essential tokens of membership in the people of God.

Until the 1980s English Customs officers were instructed to treat any traveller carrying condoms in their luggage as a suspect person, and to search for drugs or other unlawful items.)

no word in the Hebrew language of that period for "religion." Religion was not a separate, identifiable category of beliefs and activities. It was an inseparable, pervasive part of life.

There is no culture where everyone cooks in the same way.

I'm the god of funerals. I know every death custom in the world—how to die properly, how to prepare the body and soul for the afterlife. I live for death." "You must be fun at parties," I said.

How can it be men would put up with such an arrangement?' 'Why do some people demand it of women but not of men? It is just another way of doing things. As my father would have said, folk will have their customs according to their nature and their surroundings.

No one really does know how to have fun here at all. It is all etiquette.

generals outrank colonels who, in turn, outrank majors and captains and lieutenants, and everyone, but everyone, outranks children. Within the ranks of children, boys always outrank girls. One way of grinding this particularly irritating pecking order into the young girls was to teach them the old and ridiculous art of curtsying.

Keepers and Seekers were not permitted to do more than trim their hair to elbow length. Ashyn said they ought to be grateful they weren't like the spirit talkers, who weren't ever allowed to cut their hair or their nails. Personally, Moria would be more concerned with the eyes plucked out, tongue cut off, and nostrils seared part of being a spirit talker, but she could see that the uncut nails might be inconvenient as well.

Even lords ought to follow the customs.

In theory, the lord of the manor sat in judgment over his serfs. But Norman law—brought to England by invaders from France almost three centuries earlier—compelled lords to follow the customs of their predecessors; and in order to find out what those customs were, they had to formally consult twelve men of good standing in the village—a jury. So, in practice, the proceedings often became a negotiation between lord and villagers

Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail.

I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.

But to my mind,—though I am native hereAnd to the manner born—it is a customMore honor'd in the breach than the observance.

O Kate! nice customs curtsy to great kings.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

Another example may be the robust revival today of traditional or pre-revolutionary beliefs, rituals, customs, ceremonies, and even superstitions, most of which were once strenuously denounced and suppressed during the nation's drive for a cosmopolitan modernity.