"Tradition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... liberty and for a democratic way of life has always been a noble tradition of our country. Susan B. Anthony followed this tradition. Convinced that the principle of equal rights for all, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, must be expressed in the laws of a true republic, she devoted her life to the establishment ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... has a long tradition of strong partnership between the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense and the uniformed services. Both have long benefited from a relationship in which the civilian leadership exercises control with the advantage of fully candid professional advice, and the military serves loyally ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... subsequently mixed up with a deification of great men and hero-worship,—so that finally the original idea became inextricably combined with the form and attributes of some legendary individual. In Asia, probably from the greater unity of the government and the still surviving influence of patriarchal tradition, the idea of the unity of God, in a distorted reflection of the Mosaic scheme, was much more generally preserved; and accordingly all other super or ultra-human beings could only be represented as ministers of, or rebels against, his will. The Asiatic genii and fairies ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... It is a local tradition at Aire-sur-la-Lys that, about half a century ago, the good people of this ancient and picturesque town (which, like St.-Omer, remained a part of the Spanish dominions when all the rest of the Artois became ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... belong to folk history—history recovered from the memories and lips of participants or eye-witnesses, who mingle group with individual experience and both with observation, hearsay, and tradition. Whether the narrators relate what they actually saw and thought and felt, what they imagine, or what they have thought and felt about slavery since, now we know why they thought and felt as they did. To the white myth of slavery must be added the slaves' own folklore and folk-say of ...
— Slave Narratives, Administrative Files (A Folk History of - Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) • Works Projects Administration
... Abbaside, A.H. 198-227 813-842. See vol. iv. 109. He was a favourite with his father, who personally taught him tradition; but he offended the Faithful by asserting the creation of the Koran, by his leaning to Shi'ah doctrine, and by changing the black garments of the Banu Abbas into green. He died of a chill at Budandun, a day's march from Tarsus, where he was buried: for this ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... lordly barrack on the ridge, commanding views that stretch from the moors to the sea. For this nine out of ten would commend him; but no true a Cleeve would ever have owned so much of audacity or disowned so much of tradition, and he has wasted a compliment on the perished ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... The tradition is, that the Mount of Transfiguration was the summit of Tabor; but Tabor is neither a high mountain, nor was it in any sense a mountain "apart;" being in those years both inhabited and fortified. All the immediately preceding ministries of Christ had been at Cesarea Philippi. ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... Carroll. Her stones, though only of the semi-precious kind, were very beautiful, amethysts which had belonged to a many-times-removed creole grandmother of hers, and the workmanship of whose fine setting dated back to France, and there was a tradition of royal ownership. Mrs. Carroll had a bracelet, a ring, a brooch, and a necklace. The stones, although deeply tinted, showed pink now instead of purple. In fact, they seemed to match the soft, rose-tinted India silk which ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... course among these ancient abodes of men, gliding softly, mainly through their dreams, with abundance of salutary touches. Full, in truth, of [167] grateful memory of some timely service at human hands! In these highland villages the tradition of celestial visitants clung fondly, of god or hero, belated or misled on long journeys, yet pleased to be among the sons of men, as their way led them up the steep, narrow, crooked street, condescending to rest a little, as one, under ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... If Mr. Crowley would religiously eschew the popular songs and magazine "poetry" of the day, and give over all his time to a perusal of the recognized classics of English verse, the result would immediately be reflected in his own compositions. As yet, he claims to be independent of scholarly tradition, but we must remind him of the Latin epigram of Mr. Owen, which Mr. Cowper thus translated under ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... at Camylot vpon kryst-masse. Camalot, in Malory's "Morte Arthure," is said to be the same as Winchester. Ritson supposes it to be Caer-went, in Monmouthshire, and afterwards confounded with Caer-wynt, or Winchester. But popular tradition here seems the best guide, which assigned the site of Camalot to the ruins of a castle on a hill, near the church of South Cadbury, in Somersetshire ...
— Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight - An Alliterative Romance-Poem (c. 1360 A.D.) • Anonymous
... owner of the soil. This prescriptive right was so generally recognised, that all parties were satisfied. In the other provinces of Ireland it was otherwise. The English and Scottish settlers in Ulster found this usage, which was an old Celtic tradition, and adopted it; their power enabled them to assert it; but the vanquished Celts themselves were not permitted by those to whom the estates were confiscated, to retain a custom so favourable to the occupier. The professed object of the agitation was to secure ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... red-bordered toga of the highest Roman officials. He is well known by repute, and the subject of many a sharp jest; for this is Pandion, formerly a stableboy, and now one of "Caesar's friends," a praetor, and one of the great men of the empire. But he knows his business; and what does Caracalla care for tradition or descent, for the murmurs and discontent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... during that part of the month she dictated. As is the case with salary, the basis for this complaint was unreasonable manipulation by the managers, loss of freedom, and an unjustified break with tradition: "I had had one [a benefit] clear of all Expence for Nine Years before; an Advantage the first Performers had been thought to merit for near Thirty Years, and had ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive
... of the idea. I sought the fact and the law behind the fact. I was the worker and maker and liberator. You were conventional. Tradition bound you. You were full bellied and content, and you sang of the things that were. You were mastered by dogma. Did the Mediaeval Church say the earth was flat, you sang of an earth that was flat, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... and as dignified as they were impressive, romantic, and beautiful. Their literature, historical and imaginative, was handed down from generation to generation; and if memory were at fault, there were the wampum belts in their archives to corroborate tradition. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... plagued And worn with famine, long and ceaseless hiss, Till their lost shape, permitted, they resumed; Yearly enjoined, some say, to undergo, This annual humbling certain numbered days, To dash their pride, and joy, for Man seduced. However, some tradition they dispersed Among the Heathen, of their purchase got, And fabled how the Serpent, whom they called Ophion, with Eurynome, the wide— Encroaching Eve perhaps, had first the rule Of high Olympus; thence by Saturn driven And Ops, ere yet Dictaean Jove ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion of the country, a circumstance which must make it an uncomfortable residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of solitude be, as immemorial tradition asserts, a necessary part of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... intrigues was profound. "His artistic soul, nurtured in the illustrious literary school of Seville," says Correa, "and developed amidst Gothic Cathedrals, lacy Moorish and stained-glass windows, was at ease only in the field of tradition. He felt at home in a complete civilization, like that of the Middle Ages, and his artisticopolitical ideas and his fear of the ignorant crowd made him regard with marked predilection all that was aristocratic ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... State to recover her. When even this warning at first failed to enforce her submission, I swore by all I held sacred in my own world and all she revered in hers—by the symbols never lightly invoked, and never, in the course of ages that cover thrice the span of Terrestrial history and tradition, invoked to sanction a lie; symbols more sacred in her eyes than, in those of mediaeval Christendom, the gathered relics that appalled the heroic soul of Harold Godwinsson—that she should only defeat her own purpose; that I would ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... like The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table exactly as I read another book like The Book of Snobs. I did not think of it as an American book, but simply as a book. Its wit and idiom were like those of the English literary tradition; and its few touches of local colour seemed merely accidental, like those of an Englishman who happened to be living in Switzerland or Sweden. My father and my father's friends were rightly enthusiastic for the book; so that it seemed to come to me ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... go upon when he commenced the labour of thirty years—merely a few old documents, a family tradition, and the similarity of name. And the Turolds were poor. Money, and a great deal of it, was needed for the search, in the first instance, of the unbroken line of descent, and for the maintenance of the title afterwards if the claim was ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... sugar cane a popular tradition obtains amongst the natives, that, in very ancient times, a vessel belonging to their country chanced by accident to leave one of her crew, under a desperate fit of sickness, at a desert island, at a considerable distance in the Eastern Seas, and that, returning ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... such diverse business as that of restaurants, cafeterias, bakeries, coal associations, pool rooms, printing establishments, meat stores and laundries. This means that the cooperatives are not following tradition but are thinking for themselves and are selecting that enterprise which will serve them most effectively. In going into these businesses where profits are greatest they are not only prospering themselves but they are performing one of their ...
— Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State • The Consumers' League of New York
... Kabalah, or tradition of the children of Seth, was carried from Chaldæa by Abraham, taught to the Egyptian priesthood by Joseph, recovered and purified by Moses, concealed under symbols in the Bible, revealed by the Saviour to Saint John, and contained, entire, under hieratic figures analogous ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Scotland eyes very little practised in such matters, and seems to have given rise, in consequence, to a popular myth. Zostera marina abounds on a series of sand banks, partially uncovered by the larger stream tides, which lie directly opposite the town of Cromarty, near the spot pointed out by tradition as the site of an earlier town, which was swept away some two or three hundred years ago by the encroachments of the sea. And these banks, with their thick covering of green Zostera, used to be pointed out by the fishermen of the place, in my ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... task. In the first place, you must settle the question whether Saint Patrick ever existed. And this is a disputed point; for while there are those, like Father Colgan, whose clear faith accepts Saint Patrick just as he stands in history and tradition, yet, on the other hand, there are sceptics, like Ledwick, who contend that the saint is nothing but a prehistoric myth, floating about in the ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... Napoleon's. Untaught, untutored, uninspired by poet's words or patriot's bidding, spontaneous as the rising and the blossoming of some wind-sown, sun-fed flower, there was, in this child of the battle, the spirit of genius, the desire to live and to die greatly. To be forever a beloved tradition in the army of her country, to have her name remembered in the roll-call; to be once shrined in the love and honor of France, Cigarette—full of the boundless joys of life that knew no weakness and no pain; strong as the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... name hardly appears in his biographies. He never, that I can recollect, mentions her in his correspondence; only refers to her on the rarest occasions. And perhaps, on the whole, this is not to be wondered at, if we accept the constant tradition that she had, unknown to herself, sat to her son for the portrait of Mrs. Nickleby, and suggested to him the main traits in the character of that inconsequent and not very wise old lady. Mrs. Nickleby, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... so called because Mara, according to Buddhist tradition, once assumed the form of a vulture on it to interrupt the meditation of Ananda; or, more probably, because it was a resort of vultures. It was near Rajagriha, the earlier capital of Asoka, so that Fa-hien connects a legend of it with his account of Patna. It abounded in caverns, ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... the French language, acquired during his residence in France while managing his father's business. The new name clung to him; the old baptismal name was dropped; posterity has almost forgotten that it was ever imposed. From the mass of tradition and personal recollections that have come down to us from so many different sources it is not always easy to decide when we are dealing with pure invention of pious fraud, and when with mere exaggeration of actual ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... moves you the Chevy Chase Huntin' Club yereby stands adjourned sine die." Thar's a moment's pause, an' then as by one impulse every gent, hoss an' dog, says "Ay!" It's yoonanimous, an' from that hour till now the Chevy Chase Huntin' Club ain't been nothin' save tradition. But that panther shore disappears; it's the end of his vandalage; an' ag'in does quadrilles, pra'rs, an poker resoom their wonted sway. That's the end; an' now, gents, if Black Jack will caper to his dooties we'll uplift our drooped energies ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... tools was a borrowed one. In all parts of Europe, as far east as Greece, in Palestine, India, Japan, New Zealand, and Africa, including Egypt, flint tools have been discovered in abundance; and of their use the existing inhabitants retain no tradition. There is also indirect evidence of their former use by the Chinese and ancient Jews. Hence there can hardly be a doubt that the inhabitants of these countries, which include nearly the whole civilised world, were once in a barbarous ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... tangle of impure whimsies has this notion of an immaculate conception, an Ebionite tradition, as I think, brought into the Christian Church! I have sometimes suspected that the Apostle John had a particular view to this point, in the first half of the first chapter of his Gospel. Not that I suppose our present Matthew then in existence, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... beside his monument, and the finest landscape of European Russia was suddenly unrolled before my eyes, I could believe the tradition of his eloquence, for here was its inspiration. Thirty or forty miles away stretched the rolling swells of forest and grain-land, fading into dimmest blue to the westward and northward, dotted with villages and sparkling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... hostility of the Esquimaux. As for Greenland, not a word had been heard from the settlers since the year 1440. Very likely the Greenlanders had all died of the Black Death, which had just killed half the people of Norway. However that might be, the tradition of a "vast land in the distant west" still survived among the people of the Faroe and Iceland, and Colombo must have heard of it. He gathered further information among the fishermen of the northern Scottish islands and then went to Portugal ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... object of the book has been by no means to present only novel material. There is an aristocracy of games, classic by all the rights of tradition and popular approval, without which a collection would be as incomplete as would an anthology of English ballads without Robin Hood, Sally in our Alley, or Drink to me only with thine Eyes. These standard games are amply represented, mingled ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... of these choruses, however, is "The Legend of the Bended Bow," a fine war-chant by Mrs. Hemans. Tradition tells that in ancient Britain the people were summoned to war by messengers who carried a bended bow; the poem tells of the various patriots approached. The reaper is bidden to leave his standing corn, the huntsman to turn from the chase; the chieftain, the prince, mothers, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... An old tradition says that this play was written in a fortnight by command of Queen Elizabeth. There can be no doubt (a) that it was written hurriedly, (b) that it nicely suited the Tudor sense of humour. It is the least interesting of the genuine plays. It is almost wholly the ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... was an apartment which, tradition said, had formerly been the refectory of the little bevy of fair sinners who sought a refuge within its walls from the temptations of the world. Their number was not large, nor their entertainments very splendid, or this limited space could not have ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... which tradition hands down as the origin of the freedom of Switzerland dates back to the beginning of the fourteenth century. At that time Switzerland was under the sovereignty of the emperor of Germany, who ruled over Central Europe. Count Rudolph of Hapsburg, a Swiss by ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... reproduction—the latter has more social possibilities than the former, because it implies a sympathetic rather than an antagonistic organic attitude. It is certainly in virtue of susceptibility to the opinion of others that society works—through public opinion, fashion, tradition, reproof, encouragement, precept, and doctrine—to bring the individual under control and make him a member of society; and it is doubtful whether this could have been accomplished if a peculiar attitude of responsiveness to ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... importance for the history of all nations, we should possess foreign and independent representations to compare with those of home growth; in the latter are expressed sympathies and antipathies as inherited by tradition and affected by the antagonism of literary differences of opinion. Moreover there will be a difference between these foreign representations. Frenchmen, as in one famous instance, will hold more to the constitutional ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... it to dry on the river-bed. Along the banks stood tall poplars, each a spire of burnished gold, blazing against the dark olive foliage on the slopes behind them; plane trees, also, very rich of colour, and fig trees shedding their latest leaves. Now, tradition has it that Alaric was buried close to the confluence of the Busento and the Crati. If so, he lay in full view of the town. But the Goths are said to have slain all their prisoners who took part in the work, to ensure secrecy. Are ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... There is a tradition that once when she had slapped Paula's pretty face, the odd child rubbed her cheek and said, with the droll calmness that rarely deserted her, "When you want to strike me again, mother, please take off your ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the woods of Cloostedd; and many a tree of mark was dug beside, and the earth beneath many a stone and scar and other landmark in that solitary forest was opened by night, until hope gradually died out, and the tradition had long ceased to prompt to action, and had become a story ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... this moment stopped in the court-yard of the de Commarin mansion, after having described that perfect half-circle, the glory of coachmen who preserve the old tradition. ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... really happy in the life to which she had condemned herself. She had been born many years too early to follow up any of the various paths now open to the intelligent, educated woman. Yet she belonged, by birth and upbringing, to that age-long tradition of command which perhaps counts for most of all to the one class which has remained in England much ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... story of Chaucer's having been fined for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street is doubted by Thynne, though hardly, Ithink, on sufficient grounds. Tradition (when it agrees with our own views) is not lightly to be disturbed, and remembering with what more than feminine powers of invective "spiritual" men seem to be not unfrequently endowed, and also how atrociously insolent a Franciscan ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... itself the true charm of St. Mammes. It has a fine ambulatory, and a range of eight monolithic columns, removed, says tradition, from an ancient Pagan temple. Their capitals are ornamented with carven foliage, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... become only shadowy tradition; even affection and human emotion, and the relationship of kin to kin, of friend to friend, had become only part of a negative existence which conformed to precedent, temporal and spiritual, as written in the archives of a ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Testament, just because it has its spring in the living Christ, is an inexhaustible fountain of life. 'True Christianity,' says Edward Caird, 'is not something which was published in Palestine, and which has been handed down by a dead tradition ever since; it is a living and growing {246} spirit, and learns the lessons of history, and is ever manifesting new powers and leading on to ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Louis, 'but I never could love that monument. It used to oppress me with a sense of having a white marble mother! And, seriously, it fills up the chancel as if it were its show-room, according to our family tradition that the church is dedicated to the Fitzjocelyns. Living or dead, we have taken it all ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... universe has been a continuous tradition; and the new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin by being gloomy. A little while ago men believed in no spirits. Now they are beginning rather slowly to ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... shows itself in its perfection, and completely realizes the ideal designed for it by the critic. Every factitious precept and conventional law was now overthrown; these poetical Protestants broke away entirely from the yoke of tradition. Yet their genius was not without a rule. Every work bears in itself the organic laws of its development. Thus, although they laugh at the famous precept of the three unities, it is because they dig still deeper down to the root of things, to grasp the true principle from which the precept issued. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... found placed under low arches hollowed in the wall in the interior of the church: tombs placed in the exterior of the wall are much less common; and the singularity of their position, leads one to look for some peculiar reason for it. Tradition often accounts for it by such stories as those mentioned by MR. COOPER. Such is the case with a handsome canopied tomb (I think with an effigy) on the south side of the choir of the cathedral of Lichfield, where ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various
... could give no intelligent answer as to their antecedents, but claimed that what the white man saw was the work of Montezuma. All that is known of this ancient people is what the ruins show, as they left no written record or even tradition of their life, unless it be some inscriptions consisting of various hieroglyphics and pictographs that are found painted upon the rocks, which undoubtedly have a meaning, but for lack of interpretation remain a sealed book. The deep mystery in which they are shrouded makes their history all ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... as we have said, all national frontiers are now fixed and registered, the position of a civilised government entangled in chronic border warfare has long been unknown; the tradition of such a state of things is preserved in popular recollection mainly by local records and old ballads. Yet for Englishmen the subject possesses peculiar interest, since it is connected with their earlier history; and moreover our dominion in India invests it with ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... It looks into the future with eyes that see visions, and stretches forward to that future with hands that are creative; an institution with no past but only a present and an idea, not acting by precedent or tradition but taking its ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... bottom was hardly visible. The lake was filled, I believe, with some minute aquatic growth which in the course of a thousand years or so would transform it into a meadow. But meantime the mystical water was inhabited, especially around the mouth of the spring, by huge trout to whom tradition ascribed a singular and provoking disposition. They would take the bait, when the fancy moved them: but the fly they would always refuse, ignoring it with calm disdain, or slapping at it with their tails and shoving it out of their way as they played on the surface ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... dwell in the world, but religion could be spread in various ways to inhabitants of the remote corners of the earth, this has been effected by divine providence. For a knowledge of religion does not come to a man from himself, but through another who has either learned it from the Word or by tradition from others who have learned it, for instance that God is, heaven and hell exist, there is a life after death, and God must be worshiped ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection—the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... existing framework of life, and live as simply and faithfully inside it as they can. To myself the plainest service is beautiful and uplifting, if it obviously evokes the spiritual ardour of the worshippers; and, on the other hand, a service in some majestic church, consecrated by age and tradition and association, and enriched by sacred art and heart-thrilling music, appeals as purely and graciously as anything in the world to my spiritual instinct. But I would frankly realise that to some such ceremonies appear merely as unmeaning and uninspiring; and the presence of such people ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in an abrupt hollow, and was entirely lost to view in a mammoth growth of pinewoods. Years ago a settlement had existed in this region, but what the nature of that settlement it was now impossible to tell. Local tradition held that, at some far-distant period, the place had been occupied by a camp of half-breed "bad-men" who worked their evil trade upon the south side of the American border, and sought security in the shelter of this perfect hiding-place. Be that as it may, ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... 'chanty,' but their reason is obvious. The modest seaman always bowed before the landsman's presumed superiority in 'book-larnin'.' What more natural than that Russell and Bullen, obsessed by so ancient a tradition, should accept uncritically the landsman's spelling. But educated sailors devoid of 'literary' pretensions have always written the word as it was pronounced. To my mind the strongest argument against the literary ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... verdict of "the whole group of civilized nations," which Matthew Arnold himself impaneled as "free from all suspicion of national and provincial partiality," we are met with the doubt whether Milton has established himself among the races that inherit the Latin tradition as securely as Dante has been accepted by the peoples of Teutonic stock. However high our own appreciation of Milton may be, the cosmopolitan verdict might not include him among the supreme poets. Indeed, we may doubt whether Vergil might not ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... there is in the richer strata of the community a certain proportion of families with a real tradition of upbringing and service; such English families as the Cecils, Balfours and Trevelyans, for example, produce, generation after generation, public-spirited and highly competent men. But the family tradition in these cases is an excess of virtue rather than any necessary consequence ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... religiously, though he called himself a member of the Society of Friends. Lady Lucy, who was of Quaker extraction, recognized in his ways and phrases echoes from the meetings and influences of her youth. But, in reality, he was self-taught and self-formed, on the lines of an Evangelical tradition, which had owed something, a couple of generations back, among his Danish forebears, to the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg. This tradition had not only been conveyed to him by a beloved and saintly mother; it had been appropriated by the man's inmost ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the ship for home! I was in a dream of San Diego, San Pedro,— with its hill so steep for taking up goods, and its stones so hard to our bare feet,— and the cliffs of San Juan! All this, too, is no more! The entire hide-business is of the past, and to the present inhabitants of California a dim tradition. The gold discoveries drew off all men from the gathering or cure of hides, the inflowing population made an end of the great droves of cattle; and now not a vessel pursues the— I was about to say dear— ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... originally called Powow, because of the tradition that the Indians used to hold their powwows upon its summit, is three hundred and thirty-two feet high, and commands a view so extended that many visitors make the ascent. One of Whittier's early prose legends is of a bewitched Yankee whose runaway ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... helplessly expensive little black frock that she drew over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off; it was in the curious and splendid coils of hair, "done" with no eye whatever to the mode du jour, that peeped from under the corresponding indifference of her hat, the merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of noble inelegance; it lurked between the leaves of the uncut but antiquated Tauchnitz volume of which, before going out, she had mechanically possessed herself. She couldn't dress ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... at Jamnia, the Jewish tradition was the subject of much animated inquiry. The religious, ethical, and practical literature of the past was sifted and treasured, and fresh additions were made. But not much was written, for until the close of the second century the new literature ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... great capital and center, into every artistic movement and cause, of the bored ones, the spoilt ones. The present system has lifted into a quasi aristocratic and leisurely state vast numbers of people without background, without tradition or culture or taste. By reason of its largeness and resources, this group of people without taste, without interest, without finesse, has come to dominate in particular the world of art as the world of play, has come to demand distraction, sensation, excitement which its unreal existence ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... deeply and uniformly panelled, that when shut, the door was not obvious; and it was like being in a box, for there were no wardrobes, only shelves shut by doors into the wall, which the old usage of the household tradition called awmries (armoires). The furniture was reasonably modern, but not obtrusively so. There was a delicious recess in the deep window, with a seat and a table in it, and a box of mignonette along the sill. It looked out into the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a short distance away lay Castle Malwood with its single trench and Forest lodge, where tradition says that William Rufus feasted before his death, and down in the valley was the spot where he is said to have fallen. The road now became a long avenue of trees—beeches with their smooth trunks, oaks growing in groups, with here and there long lawns stretching far away into distant ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... of truth sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion of THE Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound. For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain. All the great single-word answers to the world's riddle, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... repeated again and again, each time in a louder tone, until the tormented man seized his iron ruler and sprang over the counter. Then off flew the crowd, screaming and shouting along the narrow lane, for there was an old tradition that the iron ruler had a rusty stain of blood on it. Samuelsen would then retire quietly to his desk. In the course of years the episode had been of constant occurrence, and he well knew that the only way of getting ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... appears, there is no juggling with occasion or ceremonious tradition. The instinct of helpless selfishness clothes him on the ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... down to posterity, not only the history which it is in itself, but as an interpreter of the history of its age. Were it not for Art, an age would recede into the unknown, to be recorded as dark, or into the shadowy world of myth. Portraiture, more than aught else, serves to elucidate the tradition or story of a people. How impossible to explain to the twentieth century the bad mystery of our present, without the aid of Powers's head of Calhoun, the less adequate bust of Stephen A. Douglas, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... is represented with grey hair and beard; but this could not of itself be taken to contradict the supposition that he died about the age of sixty. And Leland's assertion that Chaucer attained to old age self-evidently rests on tradition only; for Leland was born more than a century after Chaucer died. Nothing occurring in any of Chaucer's own works of undisputed genuineness throws any real light on the subject. His poem, the "House of Fame," has been variously dated; but at any period of his manhood he might have said, as ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... whole ritual that has risen up around spiritual religion in all our churches, from that of the Pope himself out to that of George Fox—it is all the penny rather than the pound. This rite and that ceremony; this habit and that tradition; this ancient and long-established usage, as well as that new departure and that threatened innovation;—it is all, at its best, always the penny and never the pound. Satan busied me about the lesser matters of religion, says James ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... on the authority of tradition, is of opinion, that St. Chad's well was in the quadrangle on the south side of the minster, called the laurel court; but Gunton says, "St. Chad had his cell in the county of Stafford, was the first bishop of Lichfield, ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... in a spirit of haughty protest should for five and twenty years have voluntarily shut themselves up in their palace was already regrettable; but this imprisonment of centuries within the past, within the grooves of tradition, was far more serious and dangerous. It was all Catholicism which was thus imprisoned, whose dogmas and sacerdotal organisation were obstinately immobilised. Perhaps, in spite of its apparent flexibility, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Moses was to address to the women as well as to the men, to the Sanhedrin as well as to the people, were as follows: "You yourselves have seen - for it is not from writings, or through tradition, or from the mouths of others that ye learn it - what I did for you in Egypt; for although they were idolaters, slayers of men, and men of lewd living, still I punished them not for these sins, but only for the wrong done to you. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... instance, is what happened to Lord Byron among the British. On the other hand, German literature, like Germanic literatures in general, is disposed to concede, at least at times, a dictatorial leadership to the individual, even at the cost of tradition—as, for example, to a Klopstock, a Goethe, or a Richard Wagner. But, in exchange, the leader is often forced to uphold his power, no matter how much it may have been due to his achievements, by coercive measures—as, again for example, by ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... history it has been only another word for progress. Because a nation has pursued certain methods for a long time it does not at all follow that those methods are the best, although when a nation like the United States, so bold and alert, so little hampered by tradition, so ready to try experiments, has clung to the same methods of government for 130 years, a strong presumption has certainly been established that these methods are the best, at least for ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... speak of visions, It was received by tradition From those that were right near unto King John, Of three strange visions that to him appear'd; And, as I guess, I ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... tradition throughout our history that I should express simply and directly the opinions which I hold concerning some of the matters ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... (otherwise Analostan) island, under the fine shade trees of an old white stucco house, with big rooms; the white stucco house, originally a fine country seat (tradition says the famous Virginia Mason, author of the Fugitive Slave Law, was born here.) I reach'd the spot from my Washington quarters by ambulance up Pennsylvania avenue, through Georgetown, across the Aqueduct bridge, and around ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... authoritative way, or by proving it in the ways of reason and argument. In the authoritative way the doctrine is delivered, sometimes by the speaker himself magisterially, at other times as derived to him by tradition from wise men. The argumentative or demonstrative method of teaching, used by Plato, proceeds in all the dialectic ways, dividing, defining, demonstrating, and analysing; and the object of it consists in exploring truth alone. According to this division is ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... Agricultural science, based on physics and chemistry, on botany and zooelogy, has made wonderful strides during the last few decades. It must be confessed that the self-complaisance of the farmer and the power of tradition have offered not a little resistance to the practical application of the knowledge which the agricultural experiments establish, and the blending of the well-known conservative attitude of the farmer with a certain carelessness and ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... alone this group of choice persons, but the environment of their time, the very atmosphere, are demanded of this necromancy. The figure of Adelaide Kemble (Mrs. Sartoris) is one of these, and the tradition still survives of a concert given in the splendid, spacious hall of the Palazzo Colonna where she was the prima donna of the occasion. There were also musicals at the house of Mrs. Sartoris, where the guests met her famous sister, Fanny Kemble. Mrs. Browning was fond of both ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... equanimity the dreadful sufferings of mankind. We have inherited Christianity without Christ; we have the painted shell of a religion, and that which rattles around within it is not the burning soul of the Great Iconoclast, but a cold and shriveled and meaningless tradition. Oh! for the quick-pulsing, warm-beating, mighty human heart of the man of Galilee! Oh! for his uplifted hand, armed with a whip of scorpions, to depopulate the temples of the world, and lash his recreant preachers into devotion to the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... maps, was this little earth, and what was it like? Did trees and flowers cover the land? Did rivers flow into the sea? Listen again to the old tradition that still rings down ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... question of historical evidence, the essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of reason—truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature and without aid from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere discover for himself." To this work accordingly Mr. Green devoted the few remaining years of his life, and, dying in 1863 at the age of seventy-two, left behind him in MS. the work entitled Spiritual ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... a sketch of Thoreau, "because, from a tradition which he told me about this house of mine, I got the idea of a deathless man, which is now taking a shape very different from the original one." This refers to the tradition mentioned in the editor's note to "Septimius Felton," and forms a link in the interesting chain of ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Brancedori had expected a virgin field for a wondrous mission, he found an ancient province with ceremonies complicated as any of ancient Hebrew or Greek tradition. Each little toddler of the clan put forth a baby hand to touch the head of Ysobel in sign of welcome, and one woman came whose brow was marked with pinyon gum—and he was told that the sign was that of maternity;—all who were to be mothers must ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Tradition does not say at what time it was that this mighty hero honoured the isles of the Baltic with his actual presence, but, in return, it informs us that Holger, like so many other heroes of renown, "is not dead, but ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... because its provisions, to use his own words, included "blackmail to the landlords" and arranged for "a flagitious waste of public funds"—the foundation on which these charges rested being that, following an unvarying tradition, the Unionist Government bribed the landlords into acceptance of the Bill by relieving them of half their payment for Poor Rate, whilst it gave a corresponding relief of half the County Dues to the tenants. He also ventured the prediction, easily falsified in the results, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... in this. One may stand at Charing Cross and watch the hurrying crowds and only now and then catch sight of any one who suggests the burly John Bull of tradition. The type is not a common one, at ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... cedar chest; but, of course, as they weren't your own great-great-great-grandmother and aunt, perhaps you wouldn't care to have me tell you all about their costumes. It was a grand occasion, however—that you can take from me; and the family tradition is that Ann Mary looked like a wonderful combination of an ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... right, unwritten, but delivered by tradition from one to another, in which oftentimes there appeareth great show of equity in determining the right between parties, but in many things repugning quite both to God's law and man's. As, for example, ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... there, a portly, dignified figure in sober black, solemn of visage, sonorous of voice, a living example of the triumph of established tradition over the most savage buffetings of Fate. His enunciation was, if anything, more mellow, his demeanour more ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... rural community where there was not a bottomless pool, and I suddenly determined to shake one tradition in at least one community. So I took an extra fish-line, tied a stone to it, and climbed into a canoe, Buck watching me, but ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... the Maid's character. Shakespeare had depicted her as a witch, Voltaire as a vulgar fraud. Schiller conceives her as a genuine ambassadress of God, or rather of the Holy Virgin. Not only does he accept at its face value the tradition of her "voices," her miraculous clairvoyance, her magic influence on the French troops; but he makes her fight in the ranks with men and gives to her a terrible avenging sword, before which no Englishman can stand. But she, too, had to have her ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... the Queen's apartments. She observes that such clandestine marriages were common at that period, and cites that of the widow of our Charles the First, who secretly espoused her equerry, Jermyn. One might be disposed to think that the Duchess Elizabeth-Charlotte could have only followed some tradition, and that her assertions cannot counterbalance the statements of the contemporary personages above mentioned. But certain species of facts are often better known long after the death of the persons to whom they relate, than during ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... the quaintness of the story, placed it far above the original. Yates, Hackett, and Burke had separate dramas written upon this scene and acted the hero, leaving their traditions one to the other. I now came forth, and saying, "Give me leave," set to work, using some of the before-mentioned tradition, mark you. Added to this, Dion Boucicault brought his dramatic skill to bear, and by important additions made a better play and a more interesting character of the hero than had as yet been reached. This adaptation, in my turn, I interpreted and enlarged upon. ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... their room—— Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves, Who all the sacred mysteries of Heaven To their own vile advantages shall turn Of lucre and ambition, and the truth With superstition's and tradition's taint, Left only in those written records pure, Though not but by the ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... for railsplitting! The log-cabin tradition! Genius and statesmanship have been set aside for a popular symbol, railsplitting. A party of moral ideas has reverted to claptrap. These are the bitter comments of Seward's beaten army. Then there are curses for Greeley. Greeley has avenged Seward's lifetime ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... brought from Scotland the noted stone upon which for centuries the Scottish monarchs had been installed, and had it placed in this oaken chair which still covers it. According to tradition, this stone was the one on which Jacob slept at Bethel, and which by a series of remarkable adventures had been transported successively to Egypt, Sicily, Spain, and Ireland. In Ireland they say it stood on the hill of Tara, and that upon it were enthroned the ancient Irish kings. ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... a critical situation, and the key to it was in my accuser's hands. If he insisted that the lady in question had anything to do with me, I was committed to call him a crammer. And if I called him a crammer, he was equally committed by all tradition to punch my head. And in the humour I was then in, he was not likely to do that without getting ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... height of three or four to five or six thousand feet, were cut off, and of course became separate glaciers, occupying cirques and branch canyons along the tops and sides of the walls. The Indians have a tradition that the river used to run through a tunnel under the united fronts of the two large tributary glaciers mentioned above, which entered the main canyon from either side; and that on one occasion an Indian, anxious to get rid of his wife, had her sent adrift ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... which made most noise in the beginning of the grand Schism in the sixteenth Century was that of justification, Grotius declares[612], that the more he examined the Scriptures, the greater agreement he discovered between them and the tradition of the Roman Church concerning justification. He was persuaded that it had the same idea of the Catholic Church mentioned in the Creed, as the ancients entertained. He would have men submit to the decisions of general councils[613]; and ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... intervals of unmistakable withdrawal. Another girl might have cared, but Lottie did not care, for her failure to get a rise out of him by her mockingly varied "Oh, I say!" and "Well, rather!" In the growth of his dignified reserve Mr. Pogis was indifferent to jeers. By whatever tradition of what would or would not do he was controlled in relinquishing her acquaintance, or whether it was in obedience to some imperative ideal, or some fearful domestic influence subtly making itself felt from the coasts of his native island, or some fine despair of equalling the imagined ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... how much activity is called for on a fast is controversial. Natural Hygienists in the Herbert Shelton tradition insist that all fasters absolutely must have complete bed rest, with no books, no TV, no visitors, no enemas, no exercise, no music, and of course no food, not even a cup of herb tea. In my many years of conducting people ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... needs prayer, according to Wis. 7:7, "I called upon" God, "and the spirit of wisdom came upon me": while as regards the things he receives from man, he needs hearing, in so far as he receives from the spoken word, and reading, in so far as he receives from the tradition of Holy Writ. Secondly, he needs to apply himself by his personal study, and thus he requires ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... tradition which says that the disciple who at a subsequent period answered Christ, 'Lord! suffer me first to go and bury my father,' was this same Apostle. I do not think that at all likely, but the tradition suggests to us one last thought about the reasons why people are kept back from yielding ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... at this time and began to be the resting-place for England's illustrious dead. The invention of gunpowder, which was to make iron-clad knights a romantic tradition, also belongs to this period, which saw too, the conquest of Scotland; and the magic stone supposed to have been Jacob's pillow at Bethel, and which was the Scottish talisman, was carried to Westminster Abbey and built into a coronation-chair, which has been used at the crowning ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... a popular tradition about the naming of this gorgeous bird: When George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, worn out and discouraged by various hardships in his Newfoundland colony, decided to visit Virginia in 1628, he wrote that ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... resolved to marry either Lottie Wright or Ruth Warham—Ruth preferred, because, while Lottie would have many times more money, her skin made her a stiff dose for a young man brought up to the American tradition that the face is the woman. But that morning Sinclair exerted his charms in vain. Ruth was in a hurry, was distinctly rude, cut short what in other circumstances would have been a prolonged and delightful flirtation by tossing the sample on the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... other main centers of industry and population. Never has the value of a free Press been demonstrated so thoroughly. The American editor is accustomed to weigh the gravest problems of life on his own account without let or hindrance from tradition, and it can be affirmed most positively that, excepting the few instances of a suborned pro-German Press, the newspapers of the United States condemned the Hun and his methods as roundly and fearlessly as the "Independence ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... makes it certain that Scott's ballad of Harlaw, in "The Antiquary," is, at least in part, derived from tradition. ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... Family tradition had it that he was naturally a man of strong passions and violent temper, but since his college days, he had never, as far as living mortal could testify, lifted the impassive mask he wore, at the bidding of anger, surprise, or alarm. ...
— At Last • Marion Harland |
