Tradition

"Der Irrglaube, daß nur das rational Erfaßbare oder gar nur das wissenschaftlich Nachweisbare zum festen Wissensbesitz der Menschheit gehöre, wirkt sich verderblich aus. Er führt die »wissenschaftich aufgeklärte« Jugend dazu, den ungeheuren Schatz von Wissen und Weisheit über Bord zu werfen, der in den Traditionen jeder alten Kultur wie in den Lehren der großen Weltreligionen enthalten ist."

"Die Einzigartigkeit des Kunstwerks ist identisch mit seinem Eingebettetsein in den Zusammenhang der Tradition."

"Die Probleme der Sittlichkeit liegen auf dem Gebiet der Verantwortung, die der Sitte auf dem der Tradition."

"Die sicherste allgemeine Charakterisierung der philosophischen Tradition Europas lautet, daß sie aus einer Reihe von Fußnoten zu Platon besteht."

"Es erben sich Gesetz und Rechte // Wie eine ewge Krankheit fort; // Sie schleppen von Geschlecht sich zu Geschlechte // Und rücken sacht von Ort zu Ort. // Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohltat Plage; // Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist! // Vom Rechte, das mit uns geboren ist, // Von dem ist, leider! // Nie die Frage."

"Es ist besser, wenn jeder Mensch seiner eigenen Tradition folgt. Sie im Westen haben einen jüdisch-christlichen Hintergrund, es ist besser, wenn Sie bei Ihren Wurzeln bleiben."

"Religionen sind mir keinen Pfennig wert. Ich erziehe auch meine Kinder nicht in der jüdischen Tradition. Ich glaube nicht an Gott und finde ohnehin alle Religionen dumm."

"Traditionen sind mit anderen Worten keineswegs das Privileg konservativer Kräfte. Noch weniger gehören sie in die alleinige Erbpacht von Reaktionären, obgleich diese am lautstärksten von ihnen reden."

"Was Ihr Theaterleute Eure Tradition nennt, das ist Eure Bequemlichkeit und Schlamperei."

"„It takes three years to build a ship, it takes three centuries to build a tradition.“"

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

"The time-honoured tradition of the human race ... is around and about us and within us; we cannot think except in the forms and processes of thought which it supplies. Is it possible to doubt and to test it? and if possible, is it right?We shall find reason to answer that it is not only possible and right, but our bounden duty; that the main purpose of the tradition itself is to supply us with the means of asking questions, of testing and inquiring into things; that if we misuse it, and take it as a collection of cut-and-dried statements to be accepted without further inquiry, we are not only injuring ourselves here, but, by refusing to do our part towards the building up of the fabric which shall be inherited by our children, we are tending to cut off ourselves and our race from the human line."

"Precedents are not mere dusty phrases, which do not substantially affect the question before us. A precedent embalms a principle. The principle may be right or may be wrong—that is a question for discussion; but at the first glance it is right to conclude that it is a principle that has been acted upon and recognised by those who preceded us."

"A tradition without intelligence is not worth having."

"Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back."

"When there is freedom from mechanical conditioning, there is simplicity. The classical man is just a bundle of routine, ideas and tradition. If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow — you are not understanding yourself."

"Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there."

"Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead"

"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."

"Belief has its structures, and its symbols change. Its tradition changes. All the relationships within these forms are inter-dependent. We look at the symbols, we hope to read them, we hope for sharing and communication."

"Traditions are answers that have been discovered to enduring questions."

"You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others."

"Tradition serves as the link with prior generations, stretching into the distant and unknown past and at the same time into an equally distant and unknown future. It is a form of ritual, a constant form in a world that otherwise changes and dies, which by its very immutability serves as a reminder of and a link to the realm of the eternal and changeless. Just as attending the changeless rites of a liturgy transports the worshipper from the grimy streets into the realm of God, treating a novel or contemporary subject in a traditional form removes it from its current time and place and places it in the realm of ideas, eternal and changeless."

"The king ... like the vulgar, thinks, feels, acts, and lives Just as his father did; the unconquered powers Of precedent and custom interpose Between a king and virtue."

"History teaches us that a given view has been abandoned in favor of another by all men, or by all competent men, or perhaps by only the most vocal men; it does not teach us whether the change was sound or whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected. Only an impartial analysis of the view in question, an analysis that is not dazzled by the victory or stunned by the defeat of the adherents of the view concerned—could teach us anything regarding the worth of the view and hence regarding the meaning of the historical change."

"Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them."

"“Our ideas” are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers’ teachers; they are abbreviations and residues of the thought of the past. These thoughts were once explicit and in the center of consideration and discussion. It may even be presumed that they were once perfectly lucid. By being transmitted to later generations they have possibly been transformed, and there is no certainty that the transformation was effected consciously and with full clarity. … This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas."

"It is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them."