Quotes About Traditions

The smell of pine needles, spruce and the smell of a Christmas tree - those to me, are the scents of the holidays.

All around the Mediterranean you'll find cultures that believe men can't control themselves and shouldn't have to try.

There are two reasons why I currently teach within the framework of mindfulness. The first is that mindfulness is the least culture-bound of the three Buddhist practice traditions. It is relatively easy to extract it from the cultural and doctrinal matrix within which it arose and to present it as an evidence-based, secular, and culturally neutral process. The second reason is that the general method of mindfulness shares some features with the general method of modern science. I

These women, for all their superb drafsmanship and compositional skill, remained minor painters because they had "lifted" a set of traditions and a view of the world that was inauthentic for them. They worked within the limits of what had been defined as female by a male tradition: they saw women through male eyes, painted a male's idea of female.

We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.

it is curious that each of Russia's Times of Troubles – 1610–13, 1917–18 and 1991 –99 – ended with a new version of the old autocracy, eased by the habits and traditions of its fallen predecessor, and justified by the urgent need to restore order, radically modernize and regain Russia's place as a great power.

I love being home at Christmastime.

Britain has become a decadent society, weakened by alarming tendencies towards social and cultural suicide. Turning upon itself, it has progressively attacked or undermined the values, laws and traditions that make it a nation, creating a space that in turn has been exploited by radical Islamism.

The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources—because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.

Indeed, men who feel, who love, often hide their emotional awareness from other men for fear of being attacked and shamed. This is the big secret we all keep together—the fear of patriarchal maleness that binds everyone in our culture. We cannot love what we fear. That is why so many religious traditions teach us that there is no fear in love.

Both the ethnocentric and anti-ethnocentric extremes arise from the same root, the tendency to make absolute the differences among cultures and traditions.

Becoming aware of foreign customs, however, does not always have a beneficial effect. In the 17th Century, when the Manchus conquered China, it was the custom among the Chinese for the women to have small feet, and among the Manchus for the men to wear pigtails. Instead of each dropping their own foolish custom, they each adopted the foolish custom of the other, and the Chinese continued to wear pigtails until they shook off the domination of the Manchus in the revolution of 1911.

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.

I find that it's the simple things that remind you of family around the holidays.

I dreamed of my grandparents living there as though they always had with their habits, their rituals, their ways of speaking. With the illusory sense I had as a girl, when my own world was so fragile, that they always would be there. That they would always welcome me and care for me. That they were a place I could always go. A homeland

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling "traditions"; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as "identities" that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

The proverbs of a nation furnish the index to its spirit and the results of its civilization.

Heathen: This Anglo-Saxon word literally means "dweller on the heath." The heath is the area outside the settlement; post-Christianity, those wishing to maintain old traditions retired to the heath, hence the name. It came to be synonymous with "Pagan," sometimes with the added implication of rude, ignorant barbarian. The word has been reclaimed by Neo-Pagans subscribing to Northern European traditions and today is used with pride. See also Asatru

I have tried to communicate my ideas in a language that preserves connections, a language that is faithful both to the dispassionate, reasoned traditions of my profession and to the passionate claims of people who have been violated and outraged. I have tried to find a language that can withstand the imperatives of doublethink and allows all of us to come a little closer to facing the unspeakable.

Eigentlich gehörte sie zu einer Generation, deren turnschuh-tragenden und Sushi-essenden Vertretern schon der Besitz einer Hauskatze als unerträgliche Verantwortung erschien. "Haus bauen, Baum pflanzen, Kind zeugen" war kein Glücksrezept mehr, sondern eine Horrorvision. Die Ewigpubertierenden wollten sich alles offen halten und wunderten sich dann über Orientierungslosigkeit.

Being Indigenous, I feel very proud being an Australian and there are so many stories I want to tell.

Shocking many, Puritans wore hats in church (following Jewish practice), refused to bow or kneel during worship (which they saw as a violation of the third commandment), and allowed pigs and chickens in the church, and some of them didn't even know the Lord's Prayer.

The more we meditate on the Medicine Wheel and the Greater Wheel Above, the Cosmic Wheel, relating these to circles, spheres, mandalas of other traditions, the deeper grows our realization of the oneness of the myriad paths leading to the Center.