Quotes about Tradition

History shows that when the church accommodates culture, it weakens it.

The most oft-cited line of Newman's An Essay on the Development of Doctrine is situated in this context: "In a higher world it may be otherwise; but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." So indeed, Pope John's Newman-like image of the "flourishing garden of life" effectively holds off a stuffy traditionalism.

desacralizing

Anne sewed and planned little winter wardrobes...Nan must have a red dress, since she is so set on it...and sometimes thought of Hannah, weaving her little coat every year for the small Samuel. Mothers were the same all through the centuries...a great sisterhood of love and service...the remembered and the unremembered alike.

Miss Patty and Miss Maria are hardly such stuff as dreams are made of, laughed Anne. Can you fancy them `globe-trotting' -- especially in those shawls and caps? I suppose they'll take them off when they really begin to trot, said Priscilla, but I know they'll take their knitting with them everywhere. They simply couldn't be parted from it. They will walk about Westminster Abbey and knit, I feel sure...

I don't think listening to Mr. Howard's arguments is likely to do me much harm. Mind you, I believe what I was brought up to believe. It saves a vast of bother—and back of it all, God is good. The trouble with Mr. Howard is that he's a leetle TOO clever. He thinks that he's bound to live up to his cleverness, and that it's smarter to thrash out some new way of getting to heaven than to go by the old track the common, ignorant folks is travelling.

Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table.

It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.

Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.

A world without a Sabbath would be like a man without a smile, like summer without flowers, and like a homestead without a garden. It is the most joyous day of the week.

The Sabbath is the day on which we learn the art of surpassing civilization.

In Jewish tradition, dying in one's sleep is called a kiss of God, and dying on the Sabbath is a gift that is merited by piety. For the pious person, my father once wrote, it is a privilege to die.