Quotes About Tradition

What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.

The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.

In this same tradition, beauty is inextricably bound up with the principles of order and harmony believed to underlie the cosmos. Artists in the Classical tradition, inspired by Platonic idealism, strove to create images that represented not the world of particulars-with all its defects-but an ideal image conceived in the mind, which was taken as representing some absolute, pure, ideal form of which all particular, material forms are but a mere shadow.

Whether he is aware of it or not, every human being dwells in tradition and history. Human memory is this constant dwelling in tradition. It constitutes that fundamental human characteristic of historicity.

Marvel has this tradition, and I think that Sony has this tradition too, of hiring directors for Spider-Man who are dramatic directors. That are directors who are interested in human beings, in characters, in drama, and who are really good with actors. That kind of feels like a Spider-Man director to me. And because Spider-Man is always as big as the films that are being made at Marvel, it always is character and story. You can never take that out.

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.

It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history -- free culture. If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon.

I simply love classic design when it's reinterpreted. These collections reflect the spirit of this design philosophy; clean pared down lines and forms rooted in tradition yet made to feel new and modern with unexpected or stylized scale, finishes and detailing. This contemporary take on tradition creates a look that's at once current yet timeless, fresh yet familiar…the essence of both beautiful design and a beautifully designed home.

I'm from East Berlin. I grew up in the Bertold Brecht, Kurt Weil tradition, also in the old hippie tradition.

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.

Following the Rumanian tradition, garlic is used in excess to keep the vampires away... Following the Jewish tradition, a dispenser of schmaltz (liquid chicken fat) is kept on the table to give the vampires heartburn if they get through the garlic defense.

The tradition of always looking for the answer in the most fundamental way available - that is a great tradition, and it saves a lot of time in this world.

I may, and I think I represent a tradition that means a lot to me, which has really always been about fighting for others, for middle-class families, for working class - for working people, you know, and that's a tradition and a commitment that I take very seriously.

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.

From the Muslims I learned from the extraordinary pluralism of the Koran, the fact that the Koran endorses every single one of the major world faiths, but I was particularly enthralled by the Sufi tradition, the mystical tradition of Islam, which is so open to other religious faiths.

Mutual tolerance is the stepping stone to mutual respect. A hospitable mind is the key to a neighboring or an alien spirit, looked by dogma and guarded by tradition.

Nobody I know is as committed to excellence as Donald Palmisano. He symbolizes everything that is good about our country. If Horatio Alger were alive today, heʼd want to be just like Dr. Palmisano, one of the true Renaissance men Iʼve had the privilege and pleasure of knowing! On Leadership continues in his tradition of excellence.

'Knowing' is one of those movies where you're going to get the spectacle, and you're going to have the entertainment in the grand science fiction tradition. But also, it will perhaps stimulate some discussion to help you sort out on your own where you might choose to go in terms of your own needs. Now, I say that without preaching.

The pictures that were coming from Vietnam were showing us what was really happening on the ground level. It was in contradiction to what our political and military leaders were telling us. They were straight forward documentary images. A powerful indictment of the war, of how cruel and unjust it was. When I finally decided what to do with my life, it was to follow in that tradition.

In the mythic tradition, the Mountain is the bond between Earth and Sky. Its solitary summit reaches the sphere of eternity, and its base spreads out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the way by which man can raise himself to the divine and by which the divine can reveal itself to man.

In my own faith tradition, these questions have been very important. It has always been easiest for me to apprehend God in the natural world. I love to go to church, but when I really want to feel the presence of the divine I'm more likely to head up into the mountains.

Tradition: sit with husband in a room lit only by tree lights and remember that our blessings outnumber the lights. Happy Christmas to all.

Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.

The modern tradition of equating death with an ensuing nothingness can be abandoned. For there is no reason to believe that human death severs the quality of the oneness in the universe.

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.

Tradition will accustom people to any atrocity

Part of the pleasure of editing 'Vogue,' one that lies in a long tradition of this magazine, is being able to feature those who define the culture at any given moment, who stir things up, whose presence in the world shapes the way it looks and influences the way we see it.

There actually had been a tradition within English music of the '60s of people looking eastwards, maybe in quite a naïve way, but nonetheless, you had musicians like George Harrison or Bryan Jones recording the musicians of Joujouka in North Africa.

For me, the stereoscopic imagery was a new game to play with. Surprisingly enough, it's also a return to tradition. I'm back with paper-looking puppets moving about in several layers of theatrical backgrounds.

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

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

What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.

I would like people to feel that they've understood something more about Siena than the usual Palio as seen by tourists. It is full of beauty, romance and tradition, but also power, schemes and bribery. It's Italy in a nutshell, with all its incredible mixture of beauty and betrayal.

Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war.

I am a Christian. So, I have a deep faith. So I draw from the Christian faith...So, I'm rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place.

The Toltec tradition tells us that we surrender a portion of our life force when we dwell on any unhealed wounding event from our past. The unprocessed emotions surrounding these events burden us and weigh heavily on our hearts. They must be dealt with if we want access to all of our vitality. Ultimately, what we will find is that forgiveness is the key to reclaiming all the life force locked in past hurt.

There are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come.

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.

I support the Second Amendment. I lived in Arkansas for 18 wonderful years. I represented upstate New York. I understand and respect the tradition of gun ownership. It goes back to the founding of our country.

Im not from the States, so Thanksgiving, for me, was never a huge tradition.

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.

I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This is not just true of the innumerable unread books in the socialist realist tradition, but also of novels that carry the burden of conservative ideologies, like Guerrillas, Naipaul's worst book, where the author's disgust for a certain kind of black activist and white liberal is overpowering.

Today's innovation is tomorrow's tradition.

To recover a spiritual tradition in which creation, and the study of creation, matters would be to inaugurate new possibilities between spirituality and science that would shape the paradigms for culture, its institution, and its people.

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.

I think we need to think about Islamic tradition as a way of asking questions that cut across (and transgress) the assumptions of a purely secular world in which we already know how things stand for individual subjects as well as for societies.