#2,915

The fragments of the past that survive embarrass the modern landscape in which they stand out.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,889

The gesture, rather than the word, is the true transmitter of traditions.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 462

#2,792

In spiritually arid centuries, the only man to realize that the century is dying from thirst is the man who still harnesses an underground spring.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 448

#2,707

To do what we ought to do is the content of the Tradition.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 436

#2,561

We usually share with our predecessors more opinions than ways of reaching them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 411

#2,153

The disappearance of the peasantry and of the classical humanities ruptured the continuity with the past.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 351

#2,143

The past appears not to have left any heirs.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 349

#2,019

Our spiritual inheritance is so opulent that today an astute fool has only to exploit it in order to seem more intelligent to a slow-witted fool than an intelligent man from yesterday.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 328

#1,839

During its journey, humanity gets sores on its feet from everything except its old shoes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 302

#1,777

Intelligence is enabled to discover new truths by rediscovering old truths.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 293

#1,734

Traditional technology used to educate, because the mastery of it transmitted gestures integrated into a way of life; the teaching of rationalist technology merely instructs, by transmitting gestures alone.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 288

#1,731

Tradition is a work of the spirit which, in turn, is a work of the tradition.
When a tradition perishes the spirit is extinguished, and the presentations it shaped into objects revert to their condition as instruments.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 287

#1,480

Hatred of the past is an unequivocal sign that a society is becoming more plebeian.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 249

#1,289

Christianity, when it abolishes its ancient liturgical languages, degenerates into strange, uncouth sects.
Once contact is broken with Greek and Latin antiquity, once its medieval and patristic inheritance is lost, any simpleton turns into its exegete.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 222

#1,281

Everything that interrupts a tradition obliges us to start over.
And every origin is bloody.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 221

#1,240

Where we hear today the words “order, authority, tradition,” somebody is lying.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 215

#1,167

A soul is cultured if in it the din of the living does not drown out the music of the dead.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 205

#1,143

The irruption of non-European history into the Western tradition is an episode in the intellectual life of the 19th century.
The participants in the Western tradition are not necessary heirs of non-Western history and can only inherit it by respecting the intellectual conditions of its entry into the patrimony of the West.
In other words, there can be Sinologists in the West, for instance, but no Taoists.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 201

#1,141

Unless we inherit a spiritual tradition to interpret it, life experience teaches us nothing.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 200

#1,082

Only the soul anchored in the past is not shipwrecked in night storms.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 192