There is always change, bad customs pass and give way to better ones.
You can't go back. I know that. But you can look back.
Tunes have notes and tempos and rules. If the tune is "All the Things You Are," you have to adhere to its structure and to the tradition behind that structure.
We learn simply by the exposure of living, and what we learn most natively is the tradition in which we live.
Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.
More than an institution, more than a tradition, more than a society, Masonry is one of the forms of Divine life upon earth.
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.
All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.
A great statesman is he who knows when to depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them.
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.
There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.
It is the fashion to talk of our changing climate and bewail the hot summers and hard winters of tradition, but how seldom we pause to marvel at the remarkable constancy of the weather from year to year.
Thanksgiving. It's like we didn't even try to come up with a tradition. The tradition is, we overeat. 'Hey, how about at Thanksgiving we just eat a lot?' 'But we do that every day!' 'Oh. What if we eat a lot with people that annoy the hell out of us?'
Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
The Hollywood tradition I like best is called “sucking up to the stars.
. . . how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!
More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy. The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form.
Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.
I keep up the tradition, the zydeco.