Julius Evola Quotes

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

We must not be willing to disinter the origins of those [institutions] we wish to preserve.

We will pass on a document will not have exactly the same meaning it had when we received it from our fathers.

Many people who attack me know so little of that larger Tradition, and end up being not very traditional at all. When you invoke the whole and great Tradition, you end up scaring people who call 1950 America "traditional" Christianity. It is just what they are used to in their one limited lifetime.

What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it

It takes a lifetime to build tradition.

Customs will often outlive the remembrance of their origin.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself'as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.

I am not taking away the historical legacy, but it should not become a burden.

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course. Piracy, for example, is a tradition that has been carried on for hundreds of years, but that doesn't mean we should all attack ships and steal their gold.

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

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

...you will do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts.

For people, 'here' signifies not merely a physical space, but also an historical space.

The consciousness of being borne up by a spiritual tradition that goes back for centuries gives one a feeling of confidence and security in the face of all passing strains and stresses.

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

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.