Culture and Tradition

Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.

Acquired notions of propriety are stronger than natural instincts. It is easier to recruit for monasteries and convents than to induce an Arab woman to uncover her mouth in public, or a British officer to walk through Bond Street in a golfing cap on an afternoon in May.

I have never understood why anybody agreed to go on being a rustic after about 1400.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Our inheritance of well founded, slowly conceived codes of honor, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries can bestow.

Every man, as to character, is the creature of the age in which he lives. Very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of their times.

He never forgave the Germans for what they had done. Never. On the other hand he was deeply rooted in the German culture. We always spoke German together, because that was the best way I could follow the nuance of his personality. German was the language in which he was free to modulate and to express himself.

He who cherishes the values of culture cannot fail to be a pacifist.

The Jew who abandons his faith (in the formal sense of the word) is in a position similar to a snail that abandons its shell. He remains a Jew.

The wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations, produced by enthusiastic effort and infinite labour in every country of the world. All this is put into your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve immortality in the permanent things which we create in common.

Plain living and high thinking are no more:

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Mrs Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

I was asked whether I was trying to restore Victorian values. I said straight out I was. And I am.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

He [the Briton] is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

The glory that was Greece

Old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings … these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?

It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.

I am sorry I have not learned to play at cards. It is very useful in life: it generates kindness and consolidates society.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.