Traditional Practices Quotes

Our cautious ancestors, when yawning, blocked the way to the entrance of evil spirits by putting their hands before their mouths. We find a reason for the gesture in the delicacy of manner which forbids an indecent exposure.

Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. ("Hard" cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)

It takes far more courage to violate a custom than a law.

Generally speaking, the Smritikars never care to explain the why and the how of their dogmas.

Well, I've seen a bunch of acupuncturists and one of my sister-in-laws is an herbalist. So I know a lot about alternative medicine. I don't know a lot about the practice but I know about the world.

My parents grew up in a village where they didn't even have running water. They are first generation immigrants who are proof that arranged marriages can work, although I wouldn't want one.

Ceremonies are the outworks of manners.

I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anachronistic, but I think it's worth preserving.

I don't like overt traditionalism.

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

When I was younger, I would see shea butter being sold on the street, and I was interested how people were still coating themselves in the theater of Africanism. You see that in dashikis and hairstyles and music.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

The two Christians met on the way many people who were going to their towns, women and men, with a firebrand in the hand, herbs to drink the smoke thereof, as they are accustomed.

Farmers are always conservative. They stick to what they have learned from their fathers and from their grandfathers. This is the same all over the globe.

Kumbh Mela is the best way to get an insight of our culture.

Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

Western concepts of ownership and privatization came in and clashed with that. So land began to be exchanged.

The Chinese people, too, went through all kinds of vicissitudes in their religious development.

Breaking a glass in the northwest is rather like belching in Arabia, for it appears to be done as a mark of appreciation or elation.

A small foot in China, no different from a tiny waist in Victorian England, represented the height of female refinement. For families with marriageable daughters, foot size translated into its own form of currency and a means of achieving upward mobility. The most desirable bride possessed a three-inch foot, known as a 'golden lotus.'

I considered mores to be one of the great general causes responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic . . . the term "mores" . . . meaning . . . habits of the heart.

At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.

Growing up in Luton, we'd always eat on a cloth, placed on the floor of the living room, with no TV allowed. There were no chairs back in Bangladesh and Dad wanted to keep the tradition, so we never owned a dining table.

All ceremonies are in themselves very silly things; but yet, a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of Mannersand Decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance.