quotations about custom
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
Outside in accordance with custom; inside as we please.
SENECA
Epistulae ad Lucilium
Choose what is best; custom will make it agreeable and easy.
PYTHAGORAS
Ethical Sentences from Stobaeus
An ancient custom obtains force of nature.
CICERO
De Inventione
A good custom is surer than law.
EURIPIDES
Pirithoüs
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
Never can custom conquer nature.
CICERO
Tusculanarum Disputationum
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
The interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Representative Men
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
To attack a man's customs is to attack his very foundation.
FABIAN BYOMUHANGI
The Whirlwind
Custom suffers naught to be strange to the eye.
AUSONIUS
Epigram
The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
Paradiso
There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.
BOVEE
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
Great things astonish us, and small dishearten us. Custom makes both familiar.
LA BRUYERE
Les Caracteres
The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Spectacles"
Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone
To rev'rence what is ancient, and can plead
A course of long observance for its use,
That even servitude, the worst of ills,
Because deliver'd down from sire to son,
Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing!
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave