Best 530 quotes in «tradition quotes» category

Christianity was neither original nor unique, but that the roots of much of the Judeo/ Christian tradition lay in the prevailing Kamite (ancient Egyptian) culture of the region. We are faced with the inescapable realisation that if Jesus had been able to read the documents of old Egypt, he would have been amazed to find his own biography already substantially written some four or five thousand years previously.

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.

Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. They’ve lost everything and gained nothing. The French had merely daubed on the finishing touches at the end of a process which had begun five hundred years ago, at least. Their intuitive moral desires coincided with the ideals embodied in the formulas of their religion, yet they could live in accordance neither with those deepest impulses nor with the precepts of the religion, because society came in between with all the pressure of its tradition. No one could afford to be honest or generous or merciful because every one of them distrusted all the others; often they had more confidence in a Christian they were meeting for the first time than in a Moslem they had known for years.

Don’t be controlled by the tradition of men

Discrimination is discrimination, even when people claim it's 'tradition.

Don’t accuse others of eating when juice smears your face-fur.

Drew had never before shot like he did that day, nor has he since. It was something to see. The contest had just begun when he walked up, aimed, and felled a cluster from the very top of the boughs.

Don’t try to prove to everybody that the reason why you can’t is that nobody could. It’s no excuse. You can break the tradition by being the first person to make it happen!

Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent.

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity.

En général, les hommes n'aspirent à s'instruire que dans la mesure où ils sont affranchis du joug de la tradition; car tant que celle-ci est maîtresse des intelligences, elle suffit à tout et ne tolère pas facilement de puissance rivale.

Every generation is inculcated in traditions of prejudice which are encouraged as normal, natural and healthy.

Everybody in a village had a role to play in bringing up a child—and cherishing it—and in return that child would in due course feel responsible for everybody in that village. That is what makes life in society possible. We must love one another and help one another in our daily lives. That was the traditional African way and there was no substitute for it. None.

Every Religion, Culture or Christianity you will see it as madness and stupidity, if your not practicing it and its not yours.

Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead.

History is most important to those without a past.

Few except the poor preserve traditions. Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions.

For Christians, especially postmodern Christians bereft of any consensus, sexual difference is a similar category. We will not know what it means until we allow God to tell us what it means. The tradition has claimed that we do not know who we are and what it means to find ourselves differentiated as men and women until we allow the premises and practices of revelation to unfold. In the tradition, stretching from Augustine to John Paul II, sexual difference is not mute, inert, nonexistent, or indifferent. In this tradition, God brings man to woman and tells the two sexes something they would not otherwise know: that their creation is good, that their creation as two sexes is for the sake of enabling a church and a covenant, and that, despite their fallenness, their twoness can in itself become a witness to reconciliation and redemption through marriage. Marriage gives this aspect of our creation the power to testify, and the nonmarried offer supporting testimony through their chastity, which creates the social ecology supporting marriage.

Genau das war es gewesen, was die Menschen von einst gefürchtet hatten: Die Skrupellosigkeit einzelner Auserwählter und ihrer Prophezeiungen, die ganze Landstriche vernichtet und viele Menschen getötet hatten, auf dem Weg zu ihrem Ziel. Iani war ein Relikt aus alten Zeiten, seine Ansichten die der Magischen von einst. Zacharias hatte ihn nicht nach seinem Alter gefragt, aber er vermutete, dass er bereits am Ende des Zeitalters der Magischen viele Jahrhunderte gelebt hatte. Der Gelehrte hatte das neue Zeitalter genutzt, um die Menschen zu studieren, ihre Regeln kennenzulernen, aber er hatte sich nie mehr angepasst als unbedingt nötig. Als Iani, der Beharrliche, hatte er sich vorgestellt. Aber das war im Grunde nichts anderes als Iani, der Dickschädel.

Habit and tradition often render change undesirable.

Future generations will not fight over legacy. We'll leave them nothing.

Hello, Lucy. Do you name all your weapons, Grunthor?” “O’ course. It’s tradition.” Rhapsody nodded, understanding coming into her eyes. “That makes perfect sense. Do you find that you fight better with a weapon you’ve named?” “Yep.” Her eyes began to sparkle with excitement. “Why, Grunthor, in a way, you’re a Namer, too!” The giant broke into a pleased grin. “Well, whaddaya know. Should Oi sing a lit’le song?” “No,” said Rhapsody and Achmed in unison.

Here and throughout the Gospels, Jesus does not simply cite Scripture as though it were a self-evident, self-interpreting source of authority. He rereads it, drawing out new, often highly provocative meanings, "fulfilling" it in a way that gives it new form for a new day. What would Jesus do? Reread. The Bible tells me so.

History is riddled with blood and sin.

I am not interested in what I believe. I am not even sure what I believe. I am much more interested in what the church believes.

I always encourage them to practice in a way that will help them go back to their own tradition and get re-rooted. If they succeed at at becoming reintegrated, they will be an important instrument in transforming and renewing their tradition. ... When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage, we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society, and we will become whole again. ... Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions, and this will benefit everyone.

I did have the longest hair of any of the boys... I braided it myself each morning, to keep it out of the way and to remind myself of things I couldn’t quite remember but that, nevertheless, I knew to be true.

Ich halte nichts von dem Satz, Islam und Islamismus hätten nichts miteinander zu tun. Ich halte auch nichts von apologetischen Sätzen, wie wir sie nach den Anschlägen von Paris wieder gehört haben, diese Anschläge hätten mit dem Islam nichts zu tun. Denn die Extremisten berufen sich schließlich auf kein anderes Buch als auf den Koran. Es gibt innerhalb der islamischen Theologie eine Bandbreite an Positionen – von friedlichen, menschenfreundlichen bis hin zu menschenverachtenden, gewalttätigen Haltungen. Die eigentliche Frage ist, warum sich einige Menschen auf die humanen Aspekte der 1400-jährigen Ideen-Geschichte des Islam beziehen und andere auf die grausamen. Die andere Frage ist, wie wir die offenen, menschenfreundlichen Positionen stärken können. Es ist ein Verdrängungsmechanismus, zu behaupten, die Gewalt, die wir erleben, habe nichts mit dem Islam zu tun. Es ist das Ausweichen vor einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit den Teilen der islamischen Tradition, die längst überholt sind. Die islamische Theologie muss sich dieser Auseinandersetzung stellen.

I could not wail. Must I? Do I need to pretend? Please! Will somebody understand? Can you detach me from tradition? Please leave me alone.

Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.” Patricia Briggs.

I had to decide between being a man who is not entirely a man, and being a dead man. I chose the former.

I do not follow any tradition. I may stand at the beginning of one.

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.

If you assume that the new - and simply because it's new - is always to be better than the old, chances are you've never known anything valuable.

If you can't set a better example for progress, don't show disapproval against the worse tradition!

If you wish to break with tradition, learn your craft well, and embrace adversity

I have a feeling that we've seen the dismantling of civilisation, brick by brick, and now we're looking into the void. We thought that we were liberating people from oppressive cultural circumstances, but we were, in fact, taking something away from them. We were killing off civility and concern. We were undermining all those little ties of loyalty and consideration and affection that are necessary for human flourishing. We thought that tradition was bad, that it created hidebound societies, that it held people down. But, in fact, what tradition was doing all along was affirming community and the sense that we are members of one another. Do we really love and respect one another more in the absence of tradition and manners and all the rest? Or have we merely converted one another into moral strangers - making our countries nothing more than hotels for the convenience of guests who are required only to avoid stepping on the toes of other guests?

I have been lying to myself thinking that I know a man when I see one. And all those giant men who taught me what it is to be a man are also liars. Either that or you are a liar. You be the judge. There was silence. 'And just for the record, I won't leave my home in the care of a man who is not a man.

I have learned that each and every piece of cloth embodies the spirit, skill, and personal history of an individual weaver. . . . It ties together with an endless thread the emotional life of my people.

I'm not fond of a tradition that requires people to open the door for strangers. Or for kids to take candy from strangers.

I'm convinced that the best solutions are often the ones that are counterintuitive - that challenge conventional thinking - and end in breakthroughs. It is always easier to do things the same old way...why change? To fight this, keep your dissatisfaction index high and break with tradition. Don't be too quick to accept the way things are being done. Question whether there's a better way. Very often you will find that once you make this break from the usual way - and incidentally, this is probably the hardest thing to do—and start on a new track your horizon of new thoughts immediately broadens. New ideas flow in like water. Always keep your interests broad - don't let your mind be stunted by a limited view.

Immorality sanctified by tradition is still immorality.

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

In a world where news of inhumanity bombards our sensibilities, where grasping for things goes so far beyond our needs, where time is squandered in busyness, it is a pleasure and a privilege to pause for a look at handiwork, to see beauty amidst utility, and to know that craft traditions begun so long ago serve us today.

In 1935, when there were no other programs, the founders of AA, Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, stepped up to the plate and took action to help a crippled population. All credit for the establishment of their wonderful, life-saving group goes to them and to those who came after them who have continued the tradition. However, there are not among the estimated two or three million who attend twelve-step meetings.

In each generation, there is this certain wisdom of the ages that gets reburied in the fleeting drivelings of modernity; then, like a diamond in the rough, it is yet again unearthed by a very small minority who not only restores it but also polishes it and presents it as something new, something highly valuable and refreshing as understood by the current.

In general the relative value of the various religions is a very difficult thing to discern; it is almost impossible, perhaps quite impossible. For a religion is known only from inside.

In the Timaeus dialogues, these being a record of discussions between the Greek Statesman Solon and an Egyptian priest, Plato reports the following: 'You Greeks are all children... you have no belief rooted in the old tradition and no knowledge hoary with age. And the reason is this. There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water, and lesser one by countless other means... You remember only one deluge, though there have been many.

In Sri Lanka, the people you lived amongst, the people you went to school with, the people in whose houses you ate, whose jokes you shared: these were not the people you married. Quite possibly they were not your religion. More to the point they were probably not your caste. This word with its fearsome connotations was never, hardly ever used. But it was ever present: it muddied the waters of Sri Lanka's politics, it perfumed the air of her bed-chambers; it lurked, like a particularly noxious relative, behind the poruwa of every wedding ceremony. It was the c-word. People used its synonym, its acronym, its antonym-indeed any other nym that came to mind - in the vain hope its meaning would somehow go away. It didn't. But if the people you chose to associate with were the very ones you could not marry, then the ones you did marry were quite often people you wouldn't dream of associating with if you had any choice in the matter.

In the past, people around the world heard the buzzing of bees as voices of the departed, a murmured conveyance from the spirit world. This belief traces back to the cultures of Egypt and Greece, among others, where tradition held that a person's soul appeared in bee form when it left the body, briefly visible (and audible) in its journey to the hereafter...Nobody knows the exact sequence of events that led to the beginning of bees, but everyone can agree on at least one thing: we know what it sounded like.