Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.

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 can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

The masses of the people are no lovers of changes which run counter to immemorial custom

It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

Tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origins, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.

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.

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.

...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

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.

You can't take treasured beliefs from the past and mock them.

There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.

The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.

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.

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

I think prejudice and tradition count for three-quarters in matters of religion.

Tradition implies authority, conformity, imitation, following.

Only the self-sufficient stand alone - most people follow the crowd and imitate.

If you plan on continuing a tradition, it might be a good idea to find out just what tradition it is that you intend to continue.

It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.