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Habit and Tradition Quotes and Quotations
 A precedent embalms a principle.  Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them. Custom is second nature, and no less powerful. Custom reconciles us to everything. 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. Habit is a great deadener. Habit is habit, and not to be thrown out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time. Have a place for everything and keep the things somewheres else. That is not advice, it is merely custom. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. In some remote regions of Islam it is said, a woman caught unveiled by a stranger will raise her skirt to cover her face. Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous by simple repetition ceases to be miraculous. It is well to lie fallow for a while. She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting. The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement. The way of the world is to praise dead saints and persecute living ones. There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself. Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living. Tradition is a guide and not a jailer. Custom, that unwritten law, By which the people keep even kings in awe. Habit is stronger than reason. Laws are never as effective as habits. Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time, which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course. The gnarled fidelity of an old habit. Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything - or nothing. The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. When you are accustomed to anything, you are estranged from it. 
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