Tradition Quotes

With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y.'I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,' he said.'Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.

John Green

I'm an old-fashioned guy... I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.

Johnny Depp

Whether he is aware of it or not, every human being dwells in tradition and history. Human memory is this constant dwelling in tradition. It constitutes that fundamental human characteristic of historicity.

Medard Boss

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes -- our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

G. K. Chesterton

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

W. Somerset Maugham

A precedent embalms a principle.

Benjamin Disraeli

There is nothing in the world more stubborn than a corpse: you can hit it, you can knock it to pieces, but you cannot convince it.

Alexander Herzen

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The doctrine he was going to be teaching, starting tonight, was not the sort of ideology that would stir souls; no one would die for this religion. It would only attracts converts by promising a return to old tradition and by seeming to be the religion of the future.

Orson Scott Card

Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness

I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it.

Herman Wouk, "Time", On his retu

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

Russell Baker, "New York Times",

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Stephen Bayley

You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.

James Agee

They won't be required to sacrifice anything in order to belong to your assembly. A religion that is all sweetness, but no light; all form, but no substance; all tradition, but no precept.

Orson Scott Card

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

Alfred Jarry

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain ; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next...

Bertrand Russell

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves.

Bertrand Russell