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“We must also remember that in every little village-god and every little superstitious custom is that which we are accustomed to call our religious faith. But local customs are infinite and contradictory. Which are we to obey, and which not to obey? The Brāhmin of Southern India, for instance, would shrink in horror at the sight of another Brahmin eating meat; a Brahmin in the North thinks it a most glorious and holy thing to do—he kills goats by the hundred in sacrifice. If you put forward your custom, they are equally ready with theirs. Various are the customs all over India, but they are local. The greatest mistake made is that ignorant people always think that this local custom is the essence of our religion.”
― Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 3

“In truth, the crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge: the practising life. People have committed themselves to its construction since they came into existence - or rather, people only came into existence by applying themselves to the building of said bridge. The human being is the pontifical creature that, from its earliest evolutionary stages, has created tradition-compatible connections between the bridgeheads in the bodily realm and those in cultural programes. From the start, nature and culture are linked by a broad middle ground of embodied practices - containing languages, rituals and technical skills, in so far as these factors constitute the universal forms of automatized artificialities. This intermediate zone forms a morphologically rich, variable and stable region that can, for the time being, be referred to sufficiently clearly with such conventional categories as education, etiquette, custom, habit formation, training and exercise - without needing to wait for the purveyors of the 'human sciences', who, with all their bluster about culture, create the confusion for whose resolution they subsequently offer their services.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern

“Nothing is stronger than Custom
(Fac tibi consuescat: nil adsuetudine maius)”
― Ovid, Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love") (in three Books), Remedia Amoris ("Remedy of Love"), Medicamina Faciei Feminae ("The Art of Beauty"), The History of Love and The Court of Love

“Customs, morals—is there a difference? Woman, do you realize what you are doing? Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe—and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don’t you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes—make him feel shame if he doesn’t have it.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration.”
― Blaise Pascal, �ʱ�Բ�é���

“I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else."
"Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know.
"Cruelty is in all of us," he said. "But they made it a virtue.”
― Anthony Ryan, Queen of Fire

“The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“There probably was a time when the idea of having a toilet inside a house was repulsive.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Public opinion is less tolerant than any system of law.”
― George Orwell

“Custom! that skillful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Five GOP representative candidates this session have shocked me to my soul at how blatant they have trivialized rape. My prayers were answered in their defeat!”
― Diane Chamberlain, Conduct Unbecoming: Rape, Torture, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Military Commanders

“Rousseau (I’ll note with your permission)
Could not conceive how solemn Grimm
Dared clean his nails in front of him,
The madcap sage and rhetorician.
Champion of rights and liberty,
In this case judged wrong-headedly.
One still can be a man of action
And mind the beauty of one’s nails:
Why fight the age’s predilection?
Custom’s a despot and prevails.”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“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 they're from the village, you take them to the inn. If they're from the city, you treat them with respect when they are beautiful and throw them on the highway when they are dead.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“If it became customary to go out into the street stark naked I should not be the first nor the last to conform.”
― Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew / D'Alembert's Dream

“Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn't a single kind of fish that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“Badilisha tabia. Badilisha mazingira ya maisha yako. Haijalishi una umri kiasi gani au wewe ni mwanamke au mwanamume, bado hujachelewa kubadili maisha yako kutoka duni kuwa bora �� kuwa na amani, furaha na kuridhika. Kama desturi yako ni kuamka saa 12:00 asubuhi kila siku ili ufike kazini saa 2:00 asubuhi ambao ni muda wa serikali wa kuanza kazi, amka saa 11:30 asubuhi ili ufike kazini saa 1:30 asubuhi �� nusu saa kabla ya kuanza kazi. Kama unafanya kazi ya taaluma uliyosomea lakini maisha hayaendi, fikiria kubadili mwelekeo wa maisha ikiwemo taaluma kufikia malengo uliyojiwekea.”
― Enock Maregesi

“Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him it was this eternal contradiction which made them Moslems. But Amar’s relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Stenham’s calculations. For Stenham, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“I can't go to America. I don't want to go to any foreign land where I don't speak the language or know the customs. I'd rather die here by the Vietcong's hands, among my ancestors, than live like a ghost among strangers. You go!”
― Kien Nguyen, The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood

“In his masterpiece, The Histories, the man often referred to as the Father of History wrote that the Persian king Darius asked some Greeks what it would take for them to eat their dead fathers. “No price in the world,�� they cried (presumably in unison). Next, Darius summoned several Callatians, who lived in India and “who eat their dead fathers.�� Darius asked them what price would make them burn their dead fathers upon a pyre, the preferred funerary method of the Greeks. “Don’t mention such horrors!�� they shouted.

Herodotus (writing as Darius) then demonstrated a degree of understanding that would have made modern anthropologists proud. “These are matters of settled custom,�� he wrote, before paraphrasing the lyric poet Pindar, “And custom is King of all.�� In other words, society defines what is right and what is wrong.”
― Bill Schutt, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History

“customs must be introduced that require, if one is to be aware of their necessity and utility, either trusting belief or habituation from childhood on. Thus it is evident that a Volksreligion, if as the concept of religion implies its teaching is to be efficacious in active life, cannot possibly be constructed out of sheer reason. Positive religion necessarily rests on faith in the tradition by which it is handed down to us.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Art: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Aesthetics

“I don't believe in these customs and rituals, as it's like manufacturing culture-fits on the graveyard of diversity. But then I haven't yet found any other alternative to this prevalent system, which doesn't have its fair share of drawbacks. So if following a custom means being courteous to someone, why not?”
― Anurag Shrivastava, The Web of Karma

“Shaving was invented to kill time before a date.”
― M*A*S*H Episode Guide Team, M*A*S*H EPISODE GUIDE: Details All 251 Episodes with Plot Summaries. Searchable. Companion to DVDs Blu Ray and Box Set.

“Forming culture is not a one-time event.”
― Matt Chandler, Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church

“She has become part of the tribe by behaving like its members.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Usimwabudu mungu mwingine isipokuwa Mungu. Usimwabudu mtu, mnyama, sanamu, samaki, au usiziabudu fikira zako kichwani. Usiitumikie kazi, mali, mila, anasa, siasa, wala usiyatumikie mamlaka au usiutumikie umaarufu au ufahari, kuliko Mungu. Ukiithamini kazi, mali, mila, anasa, siasa au ukiyathamini mamlaka, au ukiuthamini umaarufu au ufahari zaidi kuliko Mungu, au ukiyapa majukumu yako muda mwingi zaidi kuliko Mungu umeabudu miungu; wakati ulipaswa kumwabudu Mungu peke yake. Usiwe na vipaumbele vingine vyovyote vile katika maisha yako zaidi ya Mungu, kwani Mungu ni Mungu mwenye wivu.”
― Enock Maregesi

“The author says his young son, adopted from South Korea, occasionally burps and says thank you but otherwise is doing all right.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Da roede mand ud, naar at Solen gik frem,
Og før hun gik under, vel hundret og fem
Da saae man paa Gielden ophænget.
Saa kaagte de Lever, naar Folket var svang,
Saa straxen kom Kiedler og Møllie paa Gang,
Mand troede de skulde sig sprænget.”
― Petter Dass, The Trumpet of Nordland

“[T]he institution that human cultures build up upon the hints presented by the environment or by man's physical necessities do not keep as close to the original impulse as we easily imagine. These hints are, in reality, mere rough sketches, a list of bare facts. [...] Warfare is not the expression of the instinct of pugnacity. Man's pugnacity is so small a hint in the human equipment that it may not be given any expression in inter-tribal relation. [...] Pugnacity is no more than the touch to the ball of custom, a touch also that may be withheld.”
― Ruth Benedict, Patterns Of Culture

“In proportion as men were all to resemble each other, and to have faces and manners in common, their self-love was not to be disturbed by any thing in the shape of individuality. A writer might be na tural, but he was to be natural only as far as their sense of nature would go, and this was not a great way. Besides, even when he was natural, he hardly dared to be so in language as well as idea ;- there gradually came up a kind of dress, in which a man’s mind, as well as body, was to clothe itself.”
― Leigh Hunt, The Round Table, Vol. 1: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners