Customs Quotes - Page 5

• It's my custom to say something flattering to begin with so I shall be excused if I put my foot in it later on.

  Prince Philip

  Feet, Classic, Flattering

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• Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. It seeks to show new perspectives and other choices. It is a way to help expand and liberate the consciousness; our experiences, understandings, imaginings, options and thereby our lives.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Lying, Men

  "The Soul of Man under Socialism". Book by Oscar Wilde, 1891.

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• To see the convulsions, agonies and tortures of a poor fellow-creature, whom they cannot restore nor recompense, dying to gratify luxury and tickle callous and rank organs, must require a rocky heart, and a great degree of cruelty and ferocity. I cannot find any great difference between feeding on human flesh and feeding on animal flesh, except custom and practice.

  George Cheyne

  Heart, Animal, Practice

  "An Essay on Regimen: Together with Five Discourses, Medical, Moral, and Philosophical". Book by George Cheyne, 1740.

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• The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to it. If I want others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see however strange it may be to mine. Ethics in our western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relation of man to man... but that is a limited ethics.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Men, Thinking, Animal

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• To many, Indian thought, Indian manners; Indian customs, Indian philosophy, Indian literature are repulsive at the first sight; but let them persevere, let them read, let them become familiar with the great principles underlying these ideas, and it is ninety-nine to one that the charm will come over them, and fascination will be the result. Slow and silent, as the gentle dew that falls in the morning, unseen and unheard yet producing a most tremendous result, has been the work of the calm, patient, all-suffering spiritual race upon the world of thought.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Spiritual, Morning, Philosophy

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.1041, Manonmani Publishers

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• In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Lying, Critical Analysis, Society

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.226, Harvard University Press

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• Custom without truth is error grown old.

  Tertullian

  Errors, Truth Is

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• Custom is a violent and treacherous school mistress. She, by little and lithe, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority; but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage or the power so much as to lift up our eyes.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Humble, School, Eye

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• I can hardly bring myself to caution you against drinking, because I am persuaded that I am writing to a rational creature, a gentleman, and not to a swine. However, that you may not be insensibly drawn into that beastly custom of even sober drinking and sipping, as the sots call it, I advise you to be of no club whatsoever.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Drinking, Writing, Gentleman

  Lord Chesterfield (1998). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.416, OUP Oxford

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• This is the day when people reciprocally offer, and receive, the kindest and the warmest wishes, though, in general, without meaning them on one side, or believing them on the other. They are formed by the head, in compliance with custom, though disavowed by the heart, in consequence of nature.

  Lord Chesterfield

  New Year, Believe, Heart

  Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope Earl of Chesterfield (1855). “The Works of Lord Chesterfield: Including His Letters to His Son, Etc : to which is Prefixed, an Original Life of the Author”, p.497

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• Thus, cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. It is the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment at the chief actors therein setting at defiance so completely the opinion of the world; but there is no greater fallacy; it is precisely because they do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take place at all, and strike the great world dumb with amazement.

  Charles Dickens

  Dumb, Words Of Wisdom, Injustice And Oppression

  Charles Dickens (2006). “Nicholas Nickleby: Easyread Edition”, p.2, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• An honest man is not accountable for the vice and folly of his trade, and therefore ought not to refuse the exercise of it. It is the custom of his country, and there is profit in it. We must live by the world, and such as we find it, so make use of it.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Country, Honesty, Exercise

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• Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Opposites, Church

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• Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.

  Bertrand Russell

  Progress, Moral, Protest

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Authority and the Individual”, p.30, Routledge

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• The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  World, Folly, Conventional

  Edgar Allan Poe (2004). “The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe”, p.455, Wordsworth Editions

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• The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow-men.

  Jacques Maritain

  Taken, Men, Wish

  "The Range of Reason". Book by Jacques Maritain (p. 137), 1952.

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• Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct, which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon another.

  Jane Addams

  Believe, Ideas, Suffering

  Jane Addams (2016). “Democracy and Social Ethics”, p.15, Youcanprint

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• At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wise, Fall, Hero

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.541, Library of America

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• When I am at Rome I fast as the Romans do; when I am at Milan I do not fast. So likewise you, whatever church you come to, observe the custom of the place, if you would neither give offence to others, nor take offence from them.

  Ambrose

  Rome, Giving, Church

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 677, 1922.

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• A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, and suchlike accidents; but as to death, we can experience it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it

  Michel de Montaigne

  Pain, Men, May

  Michel de Montaigne (2013). “Michel de Montaigne: Selected Essays”, p.97, Courier Corporation

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• What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Ethics, Morality, Chiefs

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.537, Simon and Schuster

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• The imagination acquires by custom a certain involuntary, unconscious power of observation and comparison, correcting its own mistakes, and arriving at precision of judgment, just as the outward eye is disciplined to compare, adjust, estimate, measure, the objects reflected on the back of its retina.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Mistake, Eye, Imagination

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• The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order.

  William Shakespeare

  Order, Office, Priorities

  'Troilus And Cressida' (1602) act 1, sc. 3, l. 85

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• The legislator commands the future; to be feeble will avail him nothing: it is for him to will what is good and to perpetuate it; to make man what he desires to be: for the laws, working upon the social body, which is inert in itself, can produce either virtue or crime, civilized customs or savagery.

  Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

  Men, Law, Desire

  "Discours sur la Constitution à donner à la France". Speech to the National Convention, April 24, 1793.

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• A man who's active and incisive can yet keep nail-care much in mind: why fight what's known to be decisive? Custom is despot of mankind.

  Alexander Pushkin

  Fighting, Men, Mind

  "Eugene Onegin". Book by Alexander Pushkin, 1833.

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