Quotes, aphorisms and phrases about tradition, which can be a popular tradition handed down, a set of religious or other beliefs, for which it is customary to think or act in a certain way.
Quotes about tradition
- What if dying was just a tradition? (Stanislaw Jerzy Lec)
- My job as a musician is to transform traditional jazz patterns, renew them and above all improve them. In this sense, music can be a means capable of changing people's ideas. (John Coltrane)
- Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead live. (Harold MacMillan)
- The man of the future will have to be born equipped with a brain and a nervous system completely different from those we have at our disposal, still traditional, Copernican, classic beings. (Eugenio Montale)
- The traditional cliché scandalizes modern man. The most subversive book in our time would be a collection of old proverbs. (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
- Men make their own history, but they do not do it arbitrarily, in circumstances chosen by themselves, but in the circumstances they find immediately before them, determined by facts and traditions. (Karl Marx)
- Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, authentic tradition is the living faith of the dead. (Jaroslav Pelikan)
- Staying, staying faithful implies an exit. Precisely if you remain in the Lord you leave yourself. Paradoxically, precisely because we remain, precisely if we are faithful we change. One does not remain faithful, like traditionalists or fundamentalists, to the letter. Loyalty is always a change, a flourishing, a growth. (Pope francesco)
- In terms of quantity, as well as in terms of quality, the far more important source of our knowledge, apart from innate knowledge, is tradition. (Kark Popper)
- Mediocrally moral men have written excellent maxims; instead virtuous men did nothing to make the tradition of virtue last. (Ernest Renan)
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- Tradition is a beauty to be preserved, not a bunch of chains to tie us together. (Ezra Pound)
- Innate human cases, that of changing things by changing their names! And to find a subterfuge to break the tradition by remaining in the tradition, where a direct interest has given sufficient thrust. (Karl Marx)
- The tradition does not consist in keeping the ashes but in keeping a flame alive. (Jean Jaurès)
- We cannot tolerate our traditional vices or their remedies. (Tito Livio)
- A true tradition is not the testimony of a past past, but a living force that animates and informs the present. (Igor Stravinskij)
- Not all those who wander are aimlessly above all not those who seek the truth, beyond tradition, beyond definition, beyond appearance. (Katherine Watson)
- Some very important types of tradition are proper to a place, and cannot be easily transplanted. These are precious goods, and it is very difficult to restore them once they are lost. (Karl Popper)
- Intellectual freedom is a deeply rooted tradition, without which it is unlikely that our specifically western culture would exist. (George Orwell)
- The tooth of history is much more poisoned than you think, you cannot escape the curses of the time ... By destroying, we remain slaves of the old world: the destruction of tradition is also a tradition. (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok)
- What is tradition? It is the progress that was made yesterday, as the progress we have to make today will constitute tomorrow's tradition. (Pope John XXIII)
- Tradition cannot be inherited; and whoever wants it must conquer it with great effort. (Thomas Stearns Eliot)
- Preserving traditions has become a fun hobby, such as stamp collecting. (Mason Cooley)
Aphorisms on tradition
- The advantage of living abroad is that, by coming into contact with the ways and customs of another people, they can be observed from outside and see that they are not as essential as the inhabitants of the country believe them. What appears evident to one is absurd to the foreigner. (William Somerset Maugham)
- Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or money to do it properly. (Kurt Herbert Adler)
- The creation of traditions in the social field performs its own function, like the invention of myths or theories in the domain of natural science: to help us put order in the events of nature. (Karl Popper)
- The story is more or less an idiot. It is tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only story worth a fucking penny is the story we make today. (Henry Ford)
- Just because something belongs to tradition, there is no reason to do it. (Lemony Snicket)
- Truth is tradition, it is not truth. (Thomas Bernhard)
- The tradition of all past generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (Karl Marx)
- It takes a lot of history to explain a little tradition. (Henry James)
- Sometimes tradition and habit are only convenient excuses for letting things be as they are, even when they are unjust and unworthy. (Matthew Scully)
- As soon as tradition came to be recognized as tradition, it died. (Allan David Bloom)
- Tradition: one of those words that conservatives use as a shortcut for thinking. (Warren Ellis)
- Men make their own history, but they do not do it arbitrarily, in circumstances chosen by themselves, but in the circumstances they find immediately before them, determined by facts and traditions. (Karl Marx)
- What is tradition? A higher authority, to which obedience is lent not because it commands what is useful to us, but only because it commands us. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
- On authority, traditions, examples of teachers. They are no less dangerous than they are useful. They make artists go astray or shy, they arm critics with terrible arguments against all originality. (Eugène Delacroix)
- Tradition is a guide and not a jailer. (W. Somerset Maugham)
- The only continuity that persists, keeping the individual communities united, is the continuity of ancestral and ritual traditions, the deep worship of ancestors. So, rather than from a material or territorial communion, the African is united with his fellow men by a spiritual communion. (Ryszard Kapuscinski)
- Where is it written that women have to deal with household chores? This made sense once, when only man worked outside the home, but today he no longer has it. I believe they are succubus of a long tradition to die. (Margherita Hack)
- There is a tradition in Marbacka, that when you go to sleep on Christmas Eve you are allowed to put a table near the bed, put a candle on it and then read as long as you want. This is the greatest of all Christmas joys. (Selma Lagerlof)
- Ignorance is the mother of traditions. (Montesquieu)
- Maintaining a valid tradition also means atrophying the thought that transforms itself into duration; and it is foolish to want to express new feelings in a preserved form. (Alfred Jarry)
- Birds that want to hover over the hills of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. (Kate Chopin)
- I love true love and I want a marriage that lasts a lifetime, as in the best traditions. (Ali Larter)
Phrases on tradition
- In ethics as in other fields of human thought there are two types of opinions: on the one hand those which are straight on tradition, on the other those which have some chance of being right.
(Bertrand Russell)
- God is gone, who acts is now only man. Respect for religious "traditions" is only apparent. (Pope Benedict XVI)
- If all men were proposed to make a choice between the various traditions and were invited to choose the most beautiful, each, after appropriate reflection, would prefer those of his country: so much to each his own customs seem far better. (Herodotus)
- Who says tradition says legacy accumulated over millions of years by a people, and who says "modernism" says taste, or sometimes mania, of what is current. I don't think that everything that is modern is always an absolute progress compared to the customs passed down from generation to generation up to us. (Amadou Hampaté Ba)
- At every crossroads on the path leading to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men guarding the past. (Maurice Maeterlinck)
- Most traditions are nothing but the diseases of a society. (Carlos Ruiz Zafòn)
- We live largely on what has been transmitted to us by those who preceded us. Tradition is a set of writings, ideas, inventions, habits to which we still refer today and which represent the legacy of the past. (Jean d’Ormesson)
- The Church insists on putting the law before love, and putting the corpus of tradition first rather than communion. (Don Andrea Gallo)
- You don't really need modernity to exist totally and completely. You need a mix of modernity and tradition. (Theodore Bikel)
- In the Siberian criminal tradition, sick people in spirit or body are considered sacred, called messengers of God and called Willed by God.(Nicolai Lilin)
- Someone said that tradition is a progress that has been successful. We must never forget that what we do and say will become tradition for those who come after us.
Therefore, we must not be content with passing on what we have received, we must add something new. Thus, each generation abandons a part of the traditions of the past and adds something of its own. (Jean D’Ormesson)
- Tradition is the law of stupid people. (John Vanbrugh)
- When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, it cannot be canceled in one day. (Chinua Achebe)
- You don't understand a tradition if you don't see it in relation to the others. (John Roger Searle)
- The most beautiful tradition in the world is the love of children for parents. But it is not a tradition inherited from the past, but a feeling that rises and renews itself to infinity. If the world does not stop, the children will in turn become parents and will be happy to have respected a tradition that they will also benefit from. (Jean D’Ormesson)
- Habit, custom and tradition are stronger than truth. There is a need for a new revolution of the spirit, there is a need for a new enthusiasm, to destroy the old. (Voltaire)
- Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. (Winston Churchill)
- Treasure, guilt and corruption are the glue that has held parents and children together for generations, not opposing traditions. (Joshua Leonard)
- Each country has its own traditions: the Scots wear kilts and play the bagpipes, the Italians eat spaghetti and the Germans drink beer. In the modern world, traditions tend to disappear because easier communications create a sort of common culture that risks being uniform and a little boring. (Jean D’Ormesson)
- Only in tradition is my love. (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
- Teaching is not a lost art, but its respect is a lost tradition. (Jacques Barzun)
- Since, if all men were proposed to make a choice between the various traditions and were invited to choose the most beautiful, each one, after appropriate reflection, would prefer those of his country: so much to each his own seem far better customs. (Herodotus)
- The two great occupations of man since he exists have been to create a set of traditions and then to destroy them when their beneficial effects were exhausted. Without stable traditions there is no civilization; but without the slow elimination of these traditions, there is no progress. (Gustave Le Bon)
