quotations about custom
Outside in accordance with custom; inside as we please.
SENECA
Epistulae ad Lucilium
Man yields to custom, as he bows to fate,
In all things ruled--mind, body, and estate;
In pain, in sickness, we for cure apply
To them we know not, and we know not why.
GEORGE CRABBE
The Gentleman Farmer
A good custom is surer than law.
EURIPIDES
Pirithoüs
Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Samuel Butler's Notebooks
Never can custom conquer nature.
CICERO
Tusculanarum Disputationum
Custom suffers naught to be strange to the eye.
AUSONIUS
Epigram
Choose what is best; custom will make it agreeable and easy.
PYTHAGORAS
Ethical Sentences from Stobaeus
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accomodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior.
RUTH BENEDICT
Patterns of Culture
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
JAMES A. MICHENER
attributed, Reader's Digest, 1975
An ancient custom obtains force of nature.
CICERO
De Inventione
Great things astonish us, and small dishearten us. Custom makes both familiar.
LA BRUYERE
Les Caracteres
The interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Representative Men
The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
Paradiso
If you are determined to live and die a slave to custom, see that it is at least a good one.
E. P. DAY
attributed, Day's Collacon
Custom will often blind one to the good, as well as to the evil effects of any long-established system.
RICHARD WHATELY
Essays
Those who live not by law would be justified by Custom: but, as common practice is the worst teacher that ever was, so the truth and goodness of things is not to be estimated by the entertainment and acceptance they find in the world.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Habit or custom, like a complex mathematical scheme, flows from a point, insensibly becomes a line, and unhappily in that which is evil, it may become a curve.
R. ROBINSON
attributed, Laconics
For the customs of the peoples are delusion;
Because it is wood cut from the forest,
The work of the hands of a craftsman with a cutting tool.
They decorate it with silver and with gold;
They fasten it with nails and with hammers
So that it will not totter.
Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field are they,
And they cannot speak;
They must be carried,
Because they cannot walk!
Do not fear them,
For they can do no harm,
Nor can they do any good.
BIBLE
Jeremiah 10:3-5
To attack a man's customs is to attack his very foundation.
FABIAN BYOMUHANGI
The Whirlwind
How many unjust and wicked things are sanctioned by custom.
TERENCE
attributed, Day's Collacon