Customs Quotes - Page 8

• That wild beast which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free.

  Ivo Andric

  Men, Law, Doe

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• It is an old custom of these people to pick up a stone and toss it on the pile. Perhaps it is a symbolical lightening of the load they carry, perhaps a small offering to the gods of the trails.

  Louis L'Amour

  Journey, Hiking, Offering

  Louis L'Amour (2004). “The Lonesome Gods”, p.74, Bantam

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• Since the discovery of oxygen the civilised world has undergone a revolution in manners and customs. The knowledge of the composition of the atmosphere, of the solid crust of the earth, of water, and of their influence upon the life of plants and animals, was linked to that discovery. The successful pursuit of innumerable trades and manufactures, the profitable separation of metals from their ores, also stand in the closest connection therewith.

  Justus von Liebig

  Successful, Animal, Discovery

  Justus von Liebig (1859). “Familiar Letters on Chemistry, in its relation to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce and Political Economy: Edited by John Blyth”, p.5

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• I know you were just trying to help. But I passed the point of help a long time ago. Look, I know about your people and customs, and I know you were raised inside a cage. The last thing you need is to be saddled with a man who can barely walk. Why don't you just go and get your own place and live? I'll be happy to put you on all my accounts. You'll never want for anything. (Adron)I can't do that. (Livia)Why not? (Adron)Because I love you. (Livia)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Love, Men, Long

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• There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Freedom, Tyrants

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• Theatres, actors, critics and public are interlocked in a machine that creaks but never stops. There is always a new season in hand and we are to busy to ask the only vital question which measures the whole structure. Why theatre at all? What for? Is it an anachronism, a superannuated oddity? Surviving like an old monument or a quaint custom? Why do we applaud and what? Has the stage a real place in our lives? What function can it have? What could it serve? What could it explore? What are its special properties?

  Peter Brook

  Real, Oddities, Hands

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• Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in

  Michel de Montaigne

  Country, Men, Practice

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.152, Stanford University Press

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• Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest

  Michel de Montaigne

  Use, Grammar, Combat

  Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, Michael Innes (1928). “Montaigne's essays”

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• The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature. We have been given a miraculous faculty: Despite the differences of language, customs and social structure we are able to communicate life experience from one whole nation to another, to communicate a difficult national experience many decades long which the second of the two has never experienced.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Differences, Two

  "Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Art —for Man's Sake: I", www.nytimes.com. September 30, 1972.

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• Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.

  Learned Hand

  Law, Justice, Common

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the utterance.

  Mark Twain

  Thinking, Utterance, Handsome

  Mark Twain (2014). “Mark Twain’s Letters & Speeches (Annotated Edition)”, p.918, Jazzybee Verlag

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• When one wants to change manners and customs, one should not do so by changing the laws.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Law, Want, Manners

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• There is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some nation or other.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Extremes, Nations

  Michel de Montaigne (1853). “The Works of Michael de Montaigne: Comprising His Essays, Letters, and Journey Through Germany and Italy. With Notes from All the Commentators, Biographical and Bibliographical Notices &c., &c”, p.271

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• The laws of conscience, though we ascribe them to nature, actually come from custom.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Law, Conscience

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• Rash and incessant scolding runs into custom and renders itself despised.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Running, Scolding, Incessant

  Michel de Montaigne, Charles Cotton, William Carew Hazlitt (2012). “Michel de Montaigne: Selected Essays”, p.157, Courier Corporation

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• Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Spring, Pride, Law

  Michel de Montaigne (1991). “The essays of Michel de Montaigne”, Lane, Allen

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• Nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will.

  William Shakespeare

  Human Nature, Shame

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 4, sc. 7, l. 186

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• Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Country, Lynching, Civilization

  "Reconstruction and Africa" (1919)

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• All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Book, Law

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VIII: Letters and Social Aims”, p.94, Harvard University Press

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• Real knowing comes up when we stand in the appropriate place. But usually we don’t. First we want to understand something according to individual knowledge, prejudice, customs and habits. This means we are standing up in our individual place, not the universal perspective. This egoistic behavior makes it very difficult to see the overall picture. But buddhas and ancestors recommend that we first stand up in the appropriate place. Just stand up, be present in the Universe itself.

  Dainin Katagiri

  Real, Mean, Knowing

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• Ancient Chinese custom if you were a guest in one of their homes and you admired some particular thing, they would wrap it up and present it to you as a gift. But isn't that what life does.

  Sterling W Sill

  Home, Thinking, Chinese

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• I never had a job. I bought my first house within a year of getting out of school, and I built a custom one four and a half years later. The Art Center didn't teach much about business, but I learned a lot from the Fortune 500 companies that were my clients.

  Richard MacDonald

  Art, Jobs, School

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• We find collected in this book [The Bible] the superstitious beliefs of the ancient inhabitants of Palestine, with indistinct echoes of Indian and Persian fables, mistaken imitation of Egyptian theories and customs, historical chronicles as dry as they are unreliable and miscellaneous poems, amatory, human and Jewish-national, which is rarely distinguished by beauties of the highest order but frequently by superfluity of expression, coarseness, bad taste, and genuine Oriental sensuality.

  Max Nordau

  Book, Echoes, Expression

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• [On Sophie Germain] When a person of the sex which, according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men... succeeds nevertheless in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating the most obscure parts of [number theory], then without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Sex, Freedom, Men

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• Customs, morals — is there a difference? Woman, do you realize what you are doing? Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe — and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes — make him feel shame if he doesn't have it.

  Jubal

  Land, Differences, Personality

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