quotations about custom
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
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
Outside in accordance with custom; inside as we please.
SENECA
Epistulae ad Lucilium
Custom suffers naught to be strange to the eye.
AUSONIUS
Epigram
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
Choose what is best; custom will make it agreeable and easy.
PYTHAGORAS
Ethical Sentences from Stobaeus
To attack a man's customs is to attack his very foundation.
FABIAN BYOMUHANGI
The Whirlwind
An ancient custom obtains force of nature.
CICERO
De Inventione
The interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Representative Men
Custom will often blind one to the good, as well as to the evil effects of any long-established system.
RICHARD WHATELY
Essays
The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
Paradiso
Never can custom conquer nature.
CICERO
Tusculanarum Disputationum
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
Everything depends on our customs and on the climates we live in. What is considered a crime here is often a virtue a few hundred leagues away; and the virtues of another hemisphere might, quite conversely, be regarded as crimes among us. There is no atrocity that hasn't been deified, no virtue that hasn't been stigmatized.
MARQUIS DE SADE
Philosophy in the Boudoir
Men do more things from custom than from reason.
FABARIA
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
Great things astonish us, and small dishearten us. Custom makes both familiar.
LA BRUYERE
Les Caracteres
The constant pressure of custom; the effects of imitation, of education, and of habit; the incalculable influence of man on man, produce a working uniformity of conviction more effectually than the gallows and the stake, though without the cruelty, and with far more than the wisdom that have usually been vouchsafed to official persecutors.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
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