Saint Ambrose Quotes

When thou art at Rome, do as they do at Rome.

When in Rome, live as the Romans do; when elsewhere, live as they live elsewhere.

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

When I go to Rome, I fast on Saturday, but in Milan I do not. Do you also follow the custom of whatever church you attend, if you do not want to give or receive scandal.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common

… a country's laws are written upon paper, and that its customs are engraved upon brass. One may play with the one, but not with the other. It is less risky for a stranger to dance upon our Constitution in the public square than to affront one of our solidified customs. The one is merely eminently respectable, the other is sacred.

A custom / More honored in the breach than the observance.

Every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be.

There was a rule at Rangers, going back to the 1950s, that players needed to turn up for every training session dressed in a suit and tie. I was a teenager. You'd have been lucky to see me in a jacket even on a Sunday - it just wasn't my style.

When you come into a country, it's difficult to come in and say, 'I will change everything.' If people have things in their mind, then it's not the best approach.

My parents are not people who would want to rock the boat. They wouldn't break the law.

Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.

If you're playing in a tradition and you have no reference point to it, no understanding and have not studied it, I can't respect that.

Nature is seldom in the wrong, custom always.

The empire of custom is most mighty.

Experience supplies painful proof that traditions once called into being are first called useful, then they become necessary. At last they are too often made idols, and all must bow down to them or be punished.

Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course.

Habit had made the custom.

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

The one great poem of New England is her Sunday.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.

When you are at Rome, do as you see.