Best 530 quotes in «tradition quotes» category

The Noah figure in this version of the story is named Xisouthros (instead of Zisudra). A god visits him in a dream, warns him that humanity is about to be destroyed in a terrible deluge, and orders him to build a huge boat of the usual dimensions in the usual way. So far this is all very familiar, but then comes a feature not found in the other versions of the tradition. The god tells Xisouthros that he is to gather up a collection of precious tablets inscribed with sacred wisdom and to bury these in a safe place deep underground in 'Sippar, the City of the Sun'. These tablets contained 'all the knowledge that humans had been given by the gods' and Xisouthros was to preserve them so that those men and women who survived the flood would be able to 'relearn all that the gods had previously taught them'.

The order never varies. Two slices of bread-and-butter each, and China tea. What a hide-bound couple we must seem, clinging to custom because we did so in England. Here, on this clean balcony, white and impersonal with centuries of sun, I think of half-past-four at Manderley, and the table drawn before the library fire. The door flung open, punctual to the minute, and the performance, never-varying, of the laying of the tea, the silver tray, the kettle, the snowy cloth.

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren’t about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men.

The past informs the present.

The patriarchy longs for the days 'when men were men' and women were oppressed, subservient - and they can see no wrong in it. It justifies its former power and lust to hold on to it - and if possible, to regain it by quoting fundamentalist and radical religion and tradition and calling it 'love'. Some love. How can oppression and power over another person's life ever be 'love'?

The question that we need to address is this: What relevance do these ancient traditions have to the experience of a modern adolescent growing up in the Western world? Rather than indulge in idle speculation, I have invited a number of young people to express their views on psychedelics and the effects these substances have had upon their lives and minds.

The questions that we must ask ourselves, and that our historians and our children will ask of us, are these: How will what we create compare with what we inherited? Will we add to our tradition or will we subtract from it? Will we enrich it or will we deplete it?

There is no such thing as passive receiving of Tradition. He who receives, the disciple, is always — must always be — the scene of a creation. To receive is to create, to innovate! 'The petrification of acquired knowledge — the freezing of spiritual things — allowing itself to be placed like an inert content in the mind and to be handed on, frozen, from one generation to another, is not real transmission….' Handing on is 'resumption, life, invention and renewal, a mode without which revealed thinking, that is to say, thinking which is authentically thought, is not possible.

Thus there is an ancient Christian tradition, from Augustine to John Paul II, which has believed and argued that sexual difference is significant. With varying degrees of explicitness, the greatest theologians in the Christian West have been relatively cohesive on the point that sexual difference, which enables biological procreation and which humans share with animals, has more than physical and animal significance. To synthesize, based on the material we have examined in this book, I propose the following theological significance for sexual difference: The same God whom we know in Christ has, in his goodness, created us as male and female. To be male or female, then, is to be blessed, for it is to be something that is good. To be this sexually differentiated creature is to be something that will be redeemed, and redeemed as it was made and not as some other creature; in other words, sexual difference is not something human beings should attempt to ignore or deplore. Sexual difference is something humans should embrace and welcome, for to do that is to honor creation and anticipate redemption. Such a way of life, to which Christ calls all human beings, means to love the neighbor and enable the neighbor to be what he or she is meant to be in the sexual sphere.

There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

The stupidest thing: tradition.

This tradition doesn't exist for Bengalis, naming a son after father or grandfather, a daughter after mother or grandmother. This sign of respect in America ad Europe, this symbol of heritage and lineage, would be ridiculed in India. Within Bengali families, individual names are sacred, inviolable. They are not meant to be inherited or shared.

There is something about saying, ‘We always do this,’ which helps keep the years together. Time is such an elusive thing that if we keep on meaning to do something interesting, but never do it, year would follow year with no special thoughtfulness being expressed in making gifts, surprises, charming table settings, and familiar food. Tradition is a good gift intended to guard the best gifts.

There probably was a time when the idea of having a toilet inside a house was repulsive.

The true rightist is not a man who wants to go back to this or that institution for the sake of a return; he wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and then either to restore or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it is ancient, contemporary, or even without precedent, brand new, "ultramodern." Old truths can be rediscovered, entirely new ones found. The Man of the Right does not have a time-bound, but a sovereign mind.

They are trying to hold on to a world that no longer exists. They are blind and terrified because they feel it slipping away from them. They are gripping thin air but they keep trying desperately to hold on to it - hoping the air will turn into something familiar and solid.

They had lived down the road from each other as children. Everyday they walked home from school hand in hand; they were childhood sweethearts, they were bestfriends. And when they came of age, in the time-honoured Sri Lankan tradition they were given in marriage. To other people.

This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.

Traditions and dogmas rub one another down to a minimum in such centers of varied intercourse; where there are a thousand faiths we are apt to become sceptical of them all.

To hear how much of a great human being you were — even if you really weren’t — open your ears at your funeral.

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.

Tradition, to me, is a poison. And when you start to destroy it, those with that poison in their veins react with hostility. They think their culture has given them something, and are blind to what it has taken away.

...training your answers (winning the losses), as if you had never lost, that is 'something' rewarding.

Tradition is a fragile thing in a culture built entirely on the memories of the elders.

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 about.

Traditions have got a lot to answer for. They lose their meaning and we cling on to something that does more harm than good.

Tradition is the code that keeps change in lock. If you refuse change, you are likely to rust and guess the cause; that long held way of doing things.

Tradition: a cage for the free spirit.

Tradition converts oddity into ordinary.

Tradition is here nothing but a bulwark against the all too violently approaching storms of unfamiliar, an element which is felt to be a principle of life but also of destruction. It is impossible to understand mannerism if one does not grasp the fact that its imitation of classical models is an escape from the threatening chaos, and that the subjective over-straining of its forms is the expression of the fear that form might fail the struggle with life and art fade into soul-less beauty.

Tradition is the prison where change is detained... To make a change, you need to agree that you are not going with the statement "this is how we do it"! Yes, that was how it was done, but what next? Agree to change!

Ultimately, our questions must emerge not from mental categories, but from deep within the heart. They must rise to the surface of our beings as we sit in silence, so that they are not just the old questions which we raise whenever we have nothing else to talk about or just for the sake of argument. They need to be the questions which make a difference in our lives.

We always say we choose our partners following our free will, when in fact, it is our cultures, traditions and religions that instilled different set of values ( and desirable virtues ) and as such directly affected what we consider acceptable in our relationships.

Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfill the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that in a monarchy was filled so randomly. Each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and supreme general, high priest and Little Father. They required all the qualities listed by the sociologist Max Weber: the personal gift of grace, the virtue of legality, and "the authority of the eternal yesterday.

Vanua is the land and you and your clan belong to, but it's more than that. It's the people who live there now and those who have lived there before. It's the traditions they've had and the songs they've sung. What they believed in and what they loved, the togetherness and the memories. The joy over babies who are born and the grief over those who have died.

We don't live like our ancestors did, so why should we base our diet and ethics on how they may or may not have lived? Let's evolve into a more peaceful, compassionate species and respect all life forms.

We believe that a man does not have to be devoted to the winning side for his loyalty to be celebrated with reverence.

We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22)

We need to learn from one another. Of one thing I am certain: No single people, tradition, religion, governmental form, ethical program, moral code, or civilization has had sufficient wisdom and goodness to set the pattern and govern the world in the ways of peace, decency, and mutual respect. I do not believe God ever intended it to be that way. He wants us to reach out and learn from the wisdom he has given to humanity over broad sweeps of time and place and personality.

We live in this bubble of ignorance. Most people know nothing about history, or the historical context of the traditions they still follow today. People do things without knowing why they're doing them.

We were two of a kind, the only difference being that he was reverential before all the traditional word magic, and I would steal it if I could. He came to the tradition as a pilgrim, I as a pickpocket.

What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?

What custom wills, in all things should we do't, The dust on antique time would lie unswept, And mountainous error be too highly heaped For truth to o'erpeer.

What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents.

Wherever a man comes, there comes a revolution. The old is for slaves.

What I meant was that in the old days, it was the Holy Ghost, le saint esprit in French, in whom the Christians believed, claiming that it provided guidance and protection for the Church and Christian life. Now, they have taken out le saint esprit and they have put in its place instead l’esprit du temps, the spirit of the times, which in a sense is now our master. We are in a deep sense slaves to this ‘‘spirit.’’ We have absolutized time, although this is philosophically absurd, and now we search how we should accommodate ourselves and even our religion to this way of thinking. I am totally opposed to this point of view, and I have stood like a firm tree against a storm during over fifty years of writing on this sub- ject. I have stood for the principle that it is we who must make the times in accordance with our sacred traditions.

What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.

when I left her to-day, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said. 'The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.'

What I am about to say does not concern the ordinary man of our day. On the contrary, I have in mind the man who finds himself involved in today's world, even at its problematic and paroxysmal points; yet he does not belong inwardly to such a world, nor will he give in to it. He feels himself, in essence, as belonging to a different race from that of the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries. The natural place for such a man, the land in which he would not be a stranger, is the world of Tradition.

When I observe Gram, I see how fragile the notion of tradition can be. If I take my eyes off the way she kneads her Easter bread, or if I fail to study the way she sews a seam in suede, or if I lose the mental image I have of her when she negotiates a better deal with a button salesman, somehow, the very essence of her will be lost. When she goes, the responsibility for carrying on will fall to me. My mother says I’m the keeper of the flame, because I work here, and because I choose to live here. A flame is a very fragile thing, too, and there are times when I wonder if I’m the on who can keep it going.