Quotes About Culture

I passed on to a window decorated with switches of wiry false hair, ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin. You too can be truly beautiful, a sign proclaimed.

you ought to know better'n me that they respect some things of ours. Or at least they leave them alone. Maybe not our women or our right to good food and education, but they respect our burying grounds.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?

In happy hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected, -- the work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

We go to Europe to be Americanized.

The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, feeds upon itself.

We do not believe our own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote on the old and the distant; we are tickled by great names; we import the religion of other nations; we quote their opinions; we cite their laws.

Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engrafted with a foreign stock.

In the East, fames are won. In the west, deeds are done.

The truest test of civilization is not the census, size of cities, or crops; but the kind of man the country turns out.

Transcendentalists assert that the human mind is the same—and just as open to inspiration—across all boundaries of geography, culture, race, and religion. They celebrate the expansive, daring explorations of the Eastern mind, and find much wisdom in Hinduism and Buddhism.

Good books replace the best universities.

These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, with good sense, steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action. But they have a singular turn for homicide; their chief end of man is to murder or to be murdered;

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight.

It's very different because the Indians live as if they are their souls and Americans live as if they are their egos.

In a non-traditional culture such as ours, dominated by technology, we value information far more than we do wisdom. But there is a difference between the two. Information involves the acquisition, organization, and dissemination of facts; a storing-up of physical data. But wisdom involves another equally crucial function: the emptying and quieting of the mind, the application of the heart, and the alchemy of reason and feeling.

Why are we still alive in these useless old bodies? This is a heartrending question to hear from old people who, in most other cultures of the world, would be the pride and joy of their communities, while in our own they are outcasts.

We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.

Our society holds to youthfulness with a white-knuckled grip. Ultimately it's all in vain. But the gospel promises us eternal youthfulness in God's presence.