382 Quotes About Tradition

The questions that we must ask ourselves, and that our historians and our children will ask of us, are these: How will what we create compare with what we inherited? Will we add to our tradition or will we subtract from it? Will we enrich it or will we deplete it?

He couldn't shame his father; they hadn't raised him that way. And the blood of the revolution didn't run in his veins. He would have to bury his heart.

Reforms, when the ground has not been prepared for them, especially if they are institutions copied from abroad, do nothing but mischief! The ancient fire was better

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

The truth is that it is impossible to bestow a right. Only duties can be placed on a man, and anyone pretending to offer you a right is trying to smuggle "the last of all oppressions" right under your nose. But this is how it has always gone, for Liberalism is a flatterer.

Life at the edge of the world, it was felt, could go on forever.

It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of everyman’s life, but it’s writ large, and we love it.

Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised.

We were two of a kind, the only difference being that he was reverential before all the traditional word magic, and I would steal it if I could. He came to the tradition as a pilgrim, I as a pickpocket.