Custom Quotes

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them. (Thomas Hardy)
Custom reconciles us to everything. View quote
Edmund Burke
They are at the end of the gallery; retired to their tea and scandal, according to their ancient custom. View quote
William Congreve
Custom is the great guide to human life. View quote
David Hume
The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom. View quote
Michel de Montaigne
Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. View quote
Mark Twain
Choose always the way that seems the best, however rough it may be. Custom will soon render it easy and agreeable. View quote
Pythagoras
Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
Call a truce, then to our labors - let us feast with friends and neighbors And be merry as the custom of our caste For if faint and forced the laughter, and if sadness follow after, We are richer by one mocking Christmas past. View quote
Rudyard Kipling
Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship. View quote
Jonathan Swift
We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature. (Plutarch)
Custom is almost second nature. View quote
Plutarch
That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom. View quote
Lydia Maria Child
Consistency is found in that work whose whole and detail are suitable to the occasion. It arises from circumstance, custom, and nature. View quote
Vitruvius
Wind indeed increases fire, but custom love. View quote
Pythagoras
Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness. View quote
James Madison
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room. View quote
William Hazlitt
Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant. View quote
Haruki Murakami
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. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation. View quote
James Frazer
There are in fact four very significant stumbling blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge. (Roger Bacon)
How many things, both just and unjust, are sanctioned by custom! View quote
Terence
Levi's station in life was the receipt of custom; and Peter's, the shore of Galilee; and Paul's, the antechambers of the High- Priest,- which "station in life" each had to leave, with brief notice. View quote
John Ruskin
Choose the life that is noblest, for custom can make it sweet to thee. View quote
Epictetus
I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid. View quote
G. K. Chesterton