George Gurdjieff Quotes

People crown kings and queens at homecoming parades all the time. We do a lot of things in our society that are simply symbolic.

And so with all things: names were vital and important.

My background is deep and set in deep time, and in a narrow space, oral traditions going back a long, long time, which I inherited by osmosis.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

Ritual is necessary for us to know anything.

Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors - the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.

I like traditions, and the national anthem is important.

The Trail of Tears has a great deal of meaning for every person of American Indian ancestry, whether they are Cherokee or not. For me, it has always stood for what is best and worst about the history of the United States.

I do love the idea of ritual.

My family is Native American, and I was raised with Native American ceremonies.

In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.

I believe in traditions; I believe in the idea of things being passed between generations and the slow transmission of cultural values through tradition.

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

I learned to do things the way the old-timers did.

Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms - the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old - to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world.

I'm a storyteller. I do this for the next generations. They have to know what traditional alpinism is all about.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby's woeful face or the venerable tower.

Colors are beautiful when they are significant.

The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.