A precedent embalms a principle.

A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

Old ways will always remain unless some one invents a new way and then lives and dies for it.

Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional forms and ceremonies.

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origin, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

The less men are fettered by tradition, the greater becomes the inward activity of their motives; the greater, again, in proportion thereto, the outward restlessness, the confused flux of mankind, the polyphony of strivings.

Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.