Definition of Tradition

Tradition

The act of delivering into the hands of another; delivery.

The unwritten or oral delivery of information, opinions, doctrines, practices, rites, and customs, from father to son, or from ancestors to posterity; the transmission of any knowledge, opinions, or practice, from forefathers to descendants by oral communication, without written memorials.

Hence, that which is transmitted orally from father to son, or from ancestors to posterity; knowledge or belief transmitted without the aid of written memorials; custom or practice long observed.

An unwritten code of law represented to have been given by God to Moses on Sinai.

That body of doctrine and discipline, or any article thereof, supposed to have been put forth by Christ or his apostles, and not committed to writing.

To transmit by way of tradition; to hand down.

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Tradition Quotations

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
Winston Churchill

Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.
Ron Paul

We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.
Henry Ford

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.
Woody Allen

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.
Andy Warhol

Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
Soren Kierkegaard

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

I'm always told that what I say is controversial. Why is it controversial? Because I speak from a tradition that has now fallen out of favor with the dominant media in this country. And so when I say things like marriage should be between one man and one woman, I'm called a bigot.
Rick Santorum

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.
Carter G. Woodson

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Since there will be no one left to talk peace after the next war, it makes good sense to break with tradition and hold the peace conference first.
William Glasser

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.
Hannah Arendt

The political tradition of ancient thought, filtered in Italy by Machiavelli, says one thing clearly: every prince needs allies, and the bigger the responsibility, the more allies he needs.
Silvio Berlusconi

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.
Adolf Loos

When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.
James Hillman

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.
David Herbert Lawrence

Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.
Galen Rowell

We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming.
Rowan Atkinson

Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.
Rowan Atkinson

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
W. Somerset Maugham

Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results.
Scott Adams

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
Russell Baker

In those countries with centuries of a craft tradition behind their building methods, techniques are tightly coordinated under the direction of the architect.
Arthur Erickson

Compared to industry in Europe or Japan, where industry was based on a craft tradition, we are sadly behind.
Arthur Erickson

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
Huston Smith

The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.
Lascelles Abercrombie

I always wanted to be a farmer. There is a tradition of that in my family.
Bjork

There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.
Harold Pinter

Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young.
John Greenleaf Whittier

More Tradition Quotations

Tradition Translations

tradition in Afrikaans is tradisie
tradition in Danish is tradition
tradition in Dutch is traditie, overlevering
tradition in Finnish is perinne
tradition in French is tradition
tradition in Italian is tradizione, tradizione
tradition in Latin is fama

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