Tradition Quotes

Traditions are not killed by facts.

The word “tradition” covered it all, as it covered so many things, some useful, some foolish.

The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You’re dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!

They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions.

Now every tradition grows continually more venerable, the farther off lies its origin, the more this is lost sight of; the generation paid it accumulates from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and excites awe.[Nun wird jedes Herkommen fortwährend ehrwürdiger, je weiter der Ursprung abliegt, je mehr dieser vergessen ist; die ihm gezollte Verehrung häuft sich von Generation zu Generation auf, das Herkommen wird zuletzt heilig und erweckt Ehrfurcht.]

It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.