382 Quotes About Tradition

But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals? Perhaps—but this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision.

In each generation, there is this certain wisdom of the ages that gets reburied in the fleeting drivelings of modernity; then, like a diamond in the rough, it is yet again unearthed by a very small minority who not only restores it but also polishes it and presents it as something new, something highly valuable and refreshing as understood by the current.

Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let's be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.

History is most important to those without a past.

En général, les hommes n'aspirent à s'instruire que dans la mesure où ils sont affranchis du joug de la tradition; car tant que celle-ci est maîtresse des intelligences, elle suffit à tout et ne tolère pas facilement de puissance rivale.

Europeans believe that culture is something they can grasp and touch because, for them, culture is comprised of objects, or remnants of objects, and this object, this remnant, conceals within it the essence of the original. For the Chinese, the matter is completely different---for them, the essence of culture can only be preserved in spiritual form.

You gotta look backwards to go forwards.

The past informs the present.

you're deluding yourself that you have some deep spiritual connection, like you didn't just read it on Wikipedia. There's a difference between tradition and culture.