James Russell Lowell Quotes

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

If it ain't baroque, don't fax it.

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

I adore tradition. I cannot stand habit. Simply to repeat is nothing, also to destroy is nothing. Tradition is never interrupted, we are always evolving but never interrupted.

The basis of national identity is to say, "This is authentic to me or my forebears," and is there even such a thing? How authentic is it to your life? Just because your grandfather did it, what does that have to do with you? If I say I'm working in the style of Rembrandt, so what? You can say it, but are you really? No, because when you try to literally copy a cultural artifact, you change it. It dissolves, and then who's looking at it? People who appreciate that kind of drawing, or people it means nothing to?

Tradition simply means that we need to end what began well and continue what is worth continuing

Assimilate all you can from tradition and then say things in your own way.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

Tradition is the thief of power. There is no area of our lives where that theft is more evident than in the area of divine healing.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.

One Original Thought is worth 1000 Meaningless Quotes.

You become a leader when you decide to be an original and not a copy.

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

I am always looking for what I think are original voices.

Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar.

I'm not into branding - I'm trying to be organic to who I am on every level. I do really connect to being a part of the working class. Those are my roots. My family [consists of] farmers from Portugal, builders, housekeepers and stonemasons.

Azhar Usman is a true original and will laugh the hate right out of you.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.

I dont want to create a monster; I want to make something which is new, exceptional, something that only I do...something that references tradition, but is still new.

I am not an original thinker-but I am an original listener.)

Pretension almost always overdoes the original, and hence exposes itself.