Tradition Quotes - Page 19

• The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are.

  Anne Lamott

  Mean, Writing, Dark

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.234, Anchor

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• I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation - with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Struggle, Heart, Games

  "This Side of Paradise". Book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920.

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• They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.

  Isaac Asimov

  Eye, Past, Would Be

  Isaac Asimov (1979). “The far ends of time and earth”

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• This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Spiritual, Believe, Emotional

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.178, A&C Black

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• What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself

  Amin Maalouf

  Country, Cutting, Two

  Amin Maalouf (2001). “In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong”, p.1, Arcade Publishing

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• If we will build righteous traditions in our families, the light of the gospel can grow ever brighter in the lives of our children from generation to generation. We can look forward to that glorious day when we will all be united together as eternal family units to reap the everlasting joy promised by our Eternal Father for His righteous children.

  L. Tom Perry

  Children, Father, Light

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• I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Doors, Years

  Henry David Thoreau (2010). “Walden”, p.300, Bibliolis Books

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• In mystical traditions, it is one's own readiness that makes experiences exoteric or esoteric. The secret isn't that you're not being told. The secret is that you're not able to hear.

  This is quotes copyright © By Pumpkin Limited

  Ram Dass

  Life, Secret, Listening

  Ram Dass (2007). “One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life”, p.69, Harmony

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• Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world.

  Molly Ivins

  Needs, World, Imperialism

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• I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.” Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.

  Chaim Potok

  Views, Stronger, World

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• Half of tradition is a lie.

  Stephen Crane

  Lying, Half

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• Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

  Susan Sontag

  Lying, Reality, America

  Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

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• In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Art, Book, Fate

  "Books hold no passport – Carlos Ruiz Zafón discusses The Shadow of the Wind". Interview with Steve Porter, www.threemonkeysonline.com.

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• Christmas is a day of meaning and traditions, a special day spent in the warm circle of family and friends." ~ (1925- ), English political leader.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Family, Christmas, Xmas

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• The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.

  Michael Pollan

  Government, Years, Two

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.91, Penguin

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• Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion." Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will be more perilous.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Crazy, Lying, Fall

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.95, A&C Black

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• Scientists are the enemies of tradition , and tradition own all the prisons. - Victor Vigny

  Eoin Colfer

  Enemy, Prison, Scientist

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• There is an old story from the Eastern tradition that says that when the gods created the universe, they found a place for everything but the truth, and this created a problem, because the gods did not want this wisdom discovered right away. One of the gods suggested the top of the highest mountain, another the farthest star, a third spoke up for the dark side of the moon, and another for the bottom of the deepest ocean. Finally, they decide to place truth inside the human heart. In that way, we would search for it all over the universe, with the secret within us all the time.

  Stephen Kendrick

  Stars, Ocean, Heart

  Stephen Kendrick (2007). “Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes”, p.39, Vintage

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• Do what you do. This Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year's Eve, Twelfth Night, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, St. Paddy's Day, and every day henceforth. Just do what you do. Live out your life and your traditions on your own terms. If it offends others, so be it. That's their problem.

  Chris Rose

  New Year, Valentine, Night

  Chris Rose (2015). “1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina”, p.126, Simon and Schuster

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• I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.

  Russell Kirk

  Loyalty, Organization, Numbers

  Russell Kirk (2014). “The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays”, p.213, Open Road Media

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• Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.

  Carl Sagan

  Years, Survival, Answers

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• You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Art, Hands, Elephants

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• The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.

  Terry Eagleton

  Thinking, Views, Authority

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• Percy: Don't I get a kiss for luck? It's kind of a tradition, right? Annabeth: Come back alive, Seaweed Brain. Then we'll see.

  Rick Riordan

  Kissing, Luck, Brain

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• Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician – the last egalitarian and open associations. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen.

  Anne Lamott

  Jobs, Writing, Dedication

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