Quotes from Ruth Benedict

I haven't strength of mind not to need a career.

I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.

The heavier our bodies, the higher our will, our spirit, rises above them.' 'The wearier we are, the more splendid the training.

The hero we sympathize with because he is in love or cherishes some personal ambition, they condemn as weak because he has allowed these feelings to come between him and his gimu or his giri.

It is my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding.

What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.

... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficient, philanthropic self.

The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good.

If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits

War is, we have been forced to admit, even in the face of its huge place in our civilization, an asocial trait.

War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.

We grow in time to trust the future for our answers.

The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.

A man's indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.

liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others.

I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.

Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whose social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us.

As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

Faith is the sturdiest the most manly of the virtues. It lies behind our pluckiest... strivings. It is the virtue of the storm just as happiness is the virtue of the sunshine.

The peoples of the earth are one family.

In a world that holds books and babies and canyon trails why should one condemn oneself to live day in day out with people one does not like and sell oneself to chaperone and correct them?

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.