Quotes About Tradition

The Western music tradition is mostly addressed to a public that has a critical mind, and judges the quality of the writing, of the interpretation. And I think it is a great tradition! It pushes the musicians to always go further, and to never stop pushing the limits and explore what can be done with sounds. And great pieces of art were born from that tradition.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

To those who say "Sufism is apolitical" or "no politics," I respond: "No politics is politics." Look at the very old African Sufi tradition, the Asian Sufi tradition, or the North African Sufi tradition. Then you get it and understand what Sufism is all about wisdom, courage and resistance.

To be a Ranger is to sense the sacred trust of upholding all that such a name means in this shrine of football. They must be true in their conception of what the Ibrox tradition seeks from them. No true Ranger has ever failed in the tradition set him.

The round-up is an aggressive tradition. I'm trying to objectively be a steward of the tradition and what it means in its choreography.

Shambhala is a tradition where there were rulers, kings, and powerful people who actually were very benevolent and kind. They got things done, and they didn't abandon their tradition.

You've got to reach towards a better language, and you're not going to make it up from scratch; you've got to reach back into the tradition. Western tradition is not as impoverished as a lot of people would like to think, but you'd have to go back before the industrial revolution; you may have to go back farther than that. Of course, the Bible has a perfectly adequate language, but it's suffered a lot of thoughtless wear.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.

Scripture is our norming norm and tradition is our normed norm and that in a doctrinal controversy Scripture alone has absolute veto power while The Great Tradition (orthodox doctrine) has a vote but not a veto.

These days I'm often called a Deviant Calvinist, but I don't really think my views do deviate from the Reformed tradition, though in some respects they may represent views that are not as popular now as they once were, or that may represent a minority report in the tradition.

From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.

This concern for the poor is in the Gospel, it is within the tradition of the Church, it is not an invention of communism and it must not be turned into an ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history.

There were positive things about the church, that is, in the European cultural sense, the architecture, the liturgy, the music, the art, such as it was, the stations of the cross in the church, the tradition, and the atmosphere of awe and mystery in the mass. The atmosphere of miracle, one of mainly mystery, that's what fascinates me.

Culinary tradition is not always based on fact. Sometimes it's based on history, on habits that come out of a time when kitchens were fueled by charcoal.

Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition.

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense, and 'cathedral-like' structure of the highly educated and articulate personality--a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) there placement of complex inner density with a new kind of self--evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available.'

All I want to do is realism and follow the tradition of realism. And explore what realism should be now be after the ubiquity of smartphones. I'm trying to answer the question. I don't think I'll ever have the words, but hopefully I'll have a few images.

As a Member of Congress, I've continued my family's tradition of focusing on education.

We come from a proud tradition of people who have insisted that none of us can be truly successful until at least the barriers to such success and thriving are completely removed. I think the black narcissism that prevails, along with the stylish materialism and self-satisfied, smug attitudes among many of our upwardly mobile brothers and sisters should be identified and criticized.

If you begin acting contrary to the public's interest, and there is no alternative governmental model, with which you're willing to engage, we, the people, will have to put forth our own extra governmental models and methods of trying to restore the balance of liberty to the liberal tradition of Western society.

In reality no food is valued solely for its nutritive power and no garment or house solely for the protection it affords against cold weather and rain.... the demand for goods is widely influenced by metaphysical, religious, and ethical considerations, by aesthetic value judgments, by customs, habits, prejudice, tradition, changing fashions, and many other things.

The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.

There's something about doing theatre in London - it sinks a little bit deeper into your soul as an actor. It's something about the tradition of theatre, about performing on the West End stage.

Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.

What I'd like to see developing is an American radicalism, libertarian in character, which relies, however weak, faint, and even mythic these traditions may be, on the American libertarian tradition. I don't mean right-wing libertarianism obviously.

These days, the media is defining what cultural capital is, and it's easily learned. If you have money, anything can be bought. We see this in China and Russia with what I call the "Bling Dynasty and New Oligarchy" in Generation Wealth. As people got rich and everybody started buying Louis Vuitton bags, it became clear that to distinguish yourself you had to have more than an expensive bag. People began to want the things that money is not supposed to be able to buy - history, tradition, education, and culture.

There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher, That might not necessarily be true. That's never happened. There're no scientists picketing outside of churches.

Do not believe a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.

Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.

Besides, everywhere, life is getting longer, marriages fall apart, divorce is a reality that happens even where the law doesn't sanction it. It remains the tradition that women are trusted to take care of the children.

The territorial state is such an ancient form of society - here in Europe it dates back thousands of years - that it is now protected by the sanctity of age and the glory of tradition. A strong religious feeling mingles with the respect and the devotion to the fatherland.

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.

People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what – and who – we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.

Tradition has to be retaken by the liberal forces, so that they can show their values of tolerance and democracy not as novel western ideas but as ones indigenous to Pakistan, as a part of its very creation.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

New England has a strong tradition of localism. What is ordinarily called election day in most of the United States is called town meeting day in Vermont.

Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East - the slagging off of a whole religious tradition.

[Dr. Constain James] refuted so well the aberrations of Darwinism.... [A system] which is repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all people, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to reason itself, would seem to need no refutation. But the corruption of this age, the machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand that such fancies, altogether absurd though they are, should - since they borrow the mask of science - be refuted by true science.

The biggest problem in countries that don't have a tradition in animation or a film industry, is that precisely, that it's not an industrial activity as it is in Hollywood where there are clear production procedures. Because of this we all become snipers making our films any way we can and crossing our fingers to get distribution so people can see them.

I think the Buddhist ethic is clearer and more systematic in some ways. The Buddhist notion is that our chief problems are greed, hatred and delusion. Well, delusion is not much mentioned in the Christian tradition. In the West, we have underplayed the idea that our moral and spiritual troubles have to do with a lack of clarity or insight because original sin has dominated so much of our thinking. We tend to think that our troubles are caused by insufficient will power.

Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by the citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind,’ the mindless peace of complacency.

A Pretty Mouth is a fine and stylish collection that pays homage to the tradition of the weird while blazing its own sinister mark. Tanzer's debut is as sharp and polished as any I've seen.

I grew up in Minnesota, where we treasure our tradition of civic engagement - and our record of having the nation's highest voter participation.

On a small planet, where minute follows minute, day follows day, year follows year, where tradition marches on with a deafening, orderly beat -sometimes the order is disturbed by a dreamer, an artist, a scribbler - sometimes the beat is changed one person at a time.

The great works belong to no one nation, no one cultural tradition even. They are universal.I want an Australian vision of arts policy that is expansive, is embracing, is not narrow, is not parochial. For example, that Australians can do Shakespeare just as well as Englishmen can because we, like every civilised nation, partake of the great canonical works. It's not about Australian nationalism; it's about our identity as a culturally ambitious, culturally sophisticated nation.

The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.

To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.