Custom, that is before all law; Nature, that is above all art.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Custom, that unwritten law, By which the people keep even kings in awe.
Laws are subordinate to custom.
Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.
Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.
The great thing about this thing we call art is that it has no rules.
Custom is a prison, locked and barred by those who long ago were dust, the keys of which are in the keeping of the dead.
Any rule, not existing in the nature of things, or that is not permanent, universal and inflexible in its application, is no law, according to any correct definition of the term law.
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.
No opposing quotes found.