The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.
Ultimately, my more significant agreement is with a virtue tradition that features Aristotle and Descartes.
My mother, whose family was heavily rabbinic, said she wanted me to continue the family tradition in the rabbinate. My father said he wanted me to be a scholar of the Talmud, but he wanted me to make my living in science.
Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone.
My thesis is that what we call 'science' is differentiated from the older myths not by being something distinct from a myth, but by being accompanied by a second-order tradition-that of critically discussing the myth. . . . In a certain sense, science is myth-making just as religion is.
We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.
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.
The almighty dollar and the lust for world wide fame, slowly killed tradition, and for that someone should hang.
The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.
I love New York. I love to come here, to play here, the tradition here. I'll never forget my first home run here was over Mickey Mantle's head.
It’s like an American tradition. A person gets successful and then he’s supposed to change for the worse. It’s silly.
I think the media has become incredibly corrupt. We used to have a profound tradition of investigative journalism in the United States. Some journalists were real heroes, such as Bob Woodward who helped uncover the Watergate scandal. But today he is leading the opposite charge, trying to bring down the careers of people and score easy victories. In other words, those who used to bust the status quo have now become the status quo.
I got locked into a tradition [at Cambridge] of doing comedy.
Muslims have their own traditions. The important point to bear in mind is that the whole Muslim tradition is totally and unequivocally opposed to autocratic and oppressive government. This is very, very clear.
I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.
Finding out what particular insights mean to people in other traditions enables us not only to respect but to love the wisdom of other religions.
I am a traditionalist, I'm not a conventional person, but I am a traditionalist in the true form of the word, in that your heart is opening, you're absolutely there for everyone, the face of pain has no tradition, by the way, and in my tradition, a guru simply means the removal of darkness.
I have enormous respect for Derek Parfit, although he seems to me bound within an unfortunate philosophical tradition - rather like the extraordinarily brilliant exponents of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Middle Ages.
The Hollywood tradition I like best is called “sucking up to the stars.
Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he picks up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.