Quotes About Culture

He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under.

Bushmills was a Protestant whiskey. Jameson for Catholics.

I am German forever, German 'nationalist'. The nazis are un-German.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

The second way of finding a meaning in life is by experiencing something—such as goodness, truth and beauty—by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness—by loving him.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to be happy. But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy. Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to be happy. But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy. [...] If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke.

Cuando la fe se atrofia, parece como que se deforma o desfigura. ¿Acaso no hemos visto también en el terreno cultural, es decir, no sólo a escala individual sino social, cómo la fe reprimida degenera en superstición?

In the America of today, values and principles had been replaced by partisanship.

I don't pretend to understand the American mind," spat Goldberg. "They often do things that make no sense to me.

Vanessa was pondering the Spanish insistence on love. Did the Latin male consider it was all women were born for, to feel and give love; to devote all their life and energy to it?

Seriez-vous un iceberg ? On m'a dit beaucoup de mal des Anglaises, mais je vous préviens ! Notre soleil ne va pas tarder à vous faire fondre, d'autant plus qu'il s'allie à notre musique et à notre vin.

I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.

When, soon, they join in their happy wedding-bonds— and wedded let them be—in pacts of peace at last, never command the Latins, here on native soil, to exchange their age-old name, to become Trojans, called the kin of Teucer, alter their language, change their style of dress. Let Latium endure.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

The cultural authenticity of cloth arises not from the purity of its origins but from the ways in which individuals and groups turn textiles to their own purposes. Consumers, not producers, determine the meaning and value of textiles.

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English!

What we have to do now, then, Sir, is to lay your request before the daughters of educated men and to ask them to help you to prevent war, not by advising their brothers how they shall protect culture and intellectual liberty, but simply by reading and writing their own tongue in such a way as to protect those rather abstract goddesses themselves.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.