15 Quotes Tagged: custom

This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.

A crime preserved in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years.

Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course.

Rousseau (I’ll note with your permission)
Could not conceive how solemn Grimm
Dared clean his nails in front of him,
The madcap sage and rhetorician.
Champion of rights and liberty,
In this case judged wrong-headedly.
One still can be a man of action
And mind the beauty of one’s nails:
Why fight the age’s predilection?
Custom’s a despot and prevails.

There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration.

On one occasion, an ancient great-aunt of mine, hieratically assuming a head-dress of feather and globules of jet, required me to accompany her to the beehives. ‘But you surely don't need a hat, Aunt Jane! They're only at the end of the garden.’ ‘It is the custom,’ she said, grandly. ‘Put a scarf over your head.’ Arrived, she stood in silence for a moment. Then — ‘I have to tell you,’ she said, formally, ‘that King George V is dead. You may be sorry, but I am not. He was not an interesting man. Besides,’ she added — as though the bees needed the telling! — ‘everyone has to die’.

We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. [...] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.

Nothing is stronger than Custom
(Fac tibi consuescat: nil adsuetudine maius)

The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress.

We must also remember that in every little village-god and every little superstitious custom is that which we are accustomed to call our religious faith. But local customs are infinite and contradictory. Which are we to obey, and which not to obey? The Brāhmin of Southern India, for instance, would shrink in horror at the sight of another Brahmin eating meat; a Brahmin in the North thinks it a most glorious and holy thing to do — he kills goats by the hundred in sacrifice. If you put forward your custom, they are equally ready with theirs. Various are the customs all over India, but they are local. The greatest mistake made is that ignorant people always think that this local custom is the essence of our religion.

The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.

They agree with the current customs. They consent with an impure age. Their principles have a semblance of right-heartedness and truth. Their conduct has a semblance of disinterestedness and purity. All men are pleased with them, and they think themselves right, but you cannot enter into the Way of Yao and Shun with them. For this reason they are called “The thieves of virtue.

If it became customary to go out into the street stark naked I should not be the first nor the last to conform.

Custom makes incongruous things congruous.