Quotes About Culture

I shop therefore I am.

When money and comfort are absent, other more fundamental aspects take on greater importance. Traditions, rules, taboos.

Of course it's alright for librarians to smell of drink.

One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.

Sitting aimlessly in bedrooms- often on the bed itself- is another characteristic feature of the English holidays. The meal was over and it was only twenty five past seven. 'The evening stretches before us,' Viola said gloomily.

The lesson started. We were to learn the subjunctive, and I found myself wondering whether I could take so kindly to the Portuguese now that I realized how often they seemed to use it. It seemed as if there were going to be a great many things I couldn't possibly say.

It was odd to think that he himself had once been on the threshold of that kind of life and that he had thrown it all away, as it were, to go out to Africa and study the ways of a so-called primitive tribe. For really, when one came to consider it, what could be more primitive than the rigid ceremonial of launching a debutante on the marriage market?

People do seem to be ashamed of admitting that they read poetry,' said Jane, 'unless they have a degree in English—it is permissible then.

My dear girl, you must cultivate a taste for the finer things. Civilized pleasures give meaning to life.

Here I am,' he said to himself, on that first day. 'A born-again vegetarian Zulu with a fake French passport and a pocket full of dollars'.

Books} are the bankers of the treasures of the mind.

He began to walk back. The crowd had cleared a little, to swell again no doubt in a minute or two when the planeload arriving from Rome came through. He could make out several dark-skinned people, men and women of African, West Indian, and Indian origin. Adam had not always been a racist, but he was one now. He thought how remarkable it was that these people could afford to travel around Europe.

Books are the carriers of civilization...They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Books are humanity in print.

At Coucy's level, men and women hawked and hunted and carried a favorite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors or out—to church, to the assizes, to meals. On occasion, huge pastries were served from which live birds were released to be caught by hawks unleashed in the banquet

Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.

Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.

Marco Polo dictated his Travels in French,

The scene is France. The theater is the world.

Henry Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image.

The English patrician bloomed in his natural climate.

Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble.

Human behavior is timeless.

Complacency is an attribute of long-retained power like that of the Chinese.