Culture and Tradition

When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

If you’re anxious for to shine in the high

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

Speech impelled us

Kent, sir—everybody knows Kent—apples, cherries, hops, and women.

I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.

O tempora, O mores!

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,

He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gunpowder, Printing, and the Protestant Religion.

Society is indeed a contract … it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Custom reconciles us to everything.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

Whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age … Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! of Oxford

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.

A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

Take up the White Man’s burden, 4 Send forth the best ye breed— Go, bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need.

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right.