tradition

It is well to lie fallow for a while.

Habit is habit and not to be thrown out of the window by any man but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

In some remote regions of Islam it is said a woman caught unveiled by a stranger will raise her skirt to cover her face.

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of custom: but of all these perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous by simple repetition ceases to be miraculous.

Custom that unwritten law By which the people keep even kings in awe.

Contemporary man has rationalized the myths but he has not been able to destroy them.

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

She always says she dislikes the abnormal it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.

Custom is second nature and no less powerful.

Have a place for everything and keep the things somewheres else. That is not advice it is merely custom.

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?

Nice customs curtsy to great kings.

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.

In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

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.

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

What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition.