Quotes
Quotes about Tradition
Commencement speakers have a good deal in common with grandfather clocks: Standing usually some six feet tall, typically ponderous in construction, more traditional than functional, their distinction is largely their noisy communication of essentially commonplace information.
Society cannot contribute anything to the breeding and growing of ingenious men. A creative genius cannot be trained. There are no schools for creativeness. A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before. A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made.
Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.
The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass- which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught- but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. The academic backwoodsmen have been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Darwin and Freud; they stretch, a solid and hostile phalanx of pedantic mediocrities, across the centuries.
...ideas have a tendency to live lives of their own, and having become a part of tradition, they are very difficult to root out. When summarized in a few neat words or phrases, these gems of wisdom become substitutes for thought, and gradually take on much of the status of revealed truth. Occasionally, some iconoclast sees fit to challenge one of them, and a brief flurry ensues, after which things go on about as before. It is easy to think of plenty of ideas that are passing, if they have not already passed, beyond the stage of effective discussion.
In that the wisdom of the few becomes available to the many, there is progress in human affairs; without it, the static routine of tradition continues.
It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.
In isolated societies creeds can be preserved. It is where people of different traditions, outlook and creeds mingle freely and exchange ideas that religious beliefs begin to be eroded. No one changes his beliefs without some instigation, some novel experience, some modification of the customary course of things, and in a closed society people believe what all their fellows obviously believe. Only when they are brought into contact with persons whom they respect holding different views do they begin to look at their inherited beliefs critically.
It is in the American tradition to stand up for one's rights--even if the new way to stand up for one's rights is to sit down.
For God's sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings! How some have been deposed, some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed-- All murdered; for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp; Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks; Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable; and humored thus, Comes at the last, and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king! Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence, Throw away respect, Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty; For you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, Need friends. Subjected thus,
The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.
Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition approves all forms of competition.
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
When you tell a story you automatically talk about traditions, but they're never separate from the people, the human implications. You're talking about your connections as a human being.
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe and aren't even aware of.
As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, but that the dead are living.
Tradition is an important help to history, but its statements should be carefully scrutinized before we rely on them.
