Tradition Quotes

• Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Culture, Vines, Grows

  "On The Road Eve" by Jonah Goldberg, www.nationalreview.com. August 15, 2001.

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• The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it

  Mark Twain

  Logic, Harder, Sawyer

  1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ch.5.

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• Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.

  N. T. Wright

  Scripture, Guides, Should

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• There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.

  James Russell Lowell

  Eternal Life, Originals, One Thing

  James Russell Lowell (1871). “My Study Windows”, p.146

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• What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it

  Thomas Carlyle

  Memories, Lying, Heart

  Thomas Carlyle (1841). “On Heroes, Hero-Worship,&the Heroic in History. Six Lectures. Reported with emendations and additions”, p.41

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• A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

  T. S. Eliot

  "After Strange Gods". Book by T. S. Eliot (p. 19), 1934.

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• 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

  Men, Assumption, Deny

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• Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.

  William Butler Yeats

  Religious, Art, Age

  William Butler Yeats (2010). “Autobiographies: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats”, p.362, Simon and Schuster

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• You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.

  John Searle

  Relation, Ifs

  "The Storm Over the University". The New York Review of Books, www.ditext.com. December 06, 1990.

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• The transformation from separation to unity, from conflict to peace, is the goal of all spiritual traditions.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Goal, Unity

  Deepak Chopra (1997). “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old”, Random House Large Print Publishing

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• We learn simply by the exposure of living, and what we learn most natively is the tradition in which we live.

  David P. Gardner

  Learning, Exposure

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• Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Happiness, Hope, Gratitude

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2014). “Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)”, p.637, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

  Lewis Mumford

  Past, Pessimist, Optimist

  Lewis Mumford (1940). “Faith for living”

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• When there is a respect for small things, there will be an even greater respect towards the bigger things. When there is no respect for small things, then neither will there be for the bigger ones. This is how the Fathers maintained Tradition.

  Elder Paisios of Mount Athos

  Respect, Father, Little Things

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• Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results.

  Scott Adams

  Inspirational, Business, Long

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• Those who feel guilty contemplating "betraying" the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal—the "eternal" tradition introduced to them in their youth—is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition.

  Daniel Dennett

  Elements, Loyal, Facts

  Daniel C. Dennett (2007). “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”, p.255, Penguin UK

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• I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

  James A. Michener

  Writing, Complaining, Nineteenth Century

  The Observer, November 26, 1989.

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• Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

  Walter Lippmann

  Records, Machines, Imitation

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• Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other-only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.

  Talcott Parsons

  Health, Science, Support

  1951 The Social System, ch.8.

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• Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

  Jaroslav Pelikan

  Life, Death, Faith

  Jaroslav Pelikan, Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Patrick Henry (2005). “Orthodoxy & Western Culture: A Collection of Essays Honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on His Eightieth Birthday”, p.16, St Vladimir's Seminary Press

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• Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Memories, Science, Technology

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• The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Christian, Imagination, Religion

  Mary Catherine Bateson (1985). “With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson”, Pocket Books

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• The few really great-the major novelists ... are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

  F. R. Leavis

  Novelists, Fiction, Awareness

  'The Great Tradition' (1948) ch. 1

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• The bird has an honor that man does not have. Man lives in the traps of his abdicated laws and traditions; but the birds live according to the natural law of God who causes the earth to turn around the sun.

  Khalil Gibran

  Men, Law, Bird

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• The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

  T. S. Eliot

  Country, Writing, Men

  T. S. Eliot (1998). “The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays”, p.28, Courier Corporation

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