Quotes About Culture

What passes for cookery in England is an abomination.

She came from the most worthless of classes - the rich, with a smattering of culture.

They were boastful, triumphant; it seemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known every sin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them like flowers ready for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing.

I had come at last, in the course of this rambling, to the shelves which hold books by the living; by women and by men; for there are almost as many books written by women now as by men. Or if that is not yet quite true, if the male is still the voluble sex, it is certainly true that women no longer write novels solely. There are Jane Harrison's books on Greek archaeology; Vernon Lee's books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell's books on Persia.

I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live, Jacob wrote to Bonamy. It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from civilization.

There are one or two people I'm fond of, and there's a little good music, and a few pictures, now and then—just enough to keep one dangling about here. Ah, but I couldn't live with savages! Are you fond of books? Music? Pictures? D'you care at all for first editions? I've got a few nice things up here, things I pick up cheap, for I can't afford to give what they ask.

Chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons.

London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them.

She came from the most worthless of all classes—the rich, with a smattering of culture.

Tenéis alguna noción de cuántos libros se escriben al año sobre las mujeres?

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today?

Bisogna poi aggiungere che la storia più importante di Catania non è quella dei costumi, del commercio, degli edifici e delle rivolte, ma la storia degli sguardi. La vita della città è piena di avvenimenti, amicizie, risse, amori, insulti, solo negli sguardi che corrono fra uomini e donne; nel resto, è povera e noiosa.

If his Russian was music, his English was murder.

I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.

Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say.

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.

Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her

Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge.

Russia - the country of Tolstoy, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great and good men.

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses

Couleur locale has been responsible for many hasty appreciations, and local color is not a fast color.

The Russian reader in old cultured Russia was certainly proud of Pushkin and of Gogol, but he was just as proud of Shakespeare or Dante, of Baudelaire or of Edgar Allan Poe, of Flaubert or of Homer, and this was the Russian reader's strength. I have a certain personal interest in the question, for if my fathers had not been good readers, I would hardly be here today, speaking of these matters in this tongue.

Disengaged employees are an unfortunate reality in the workplace, and poor leadership is often to blame.

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing,--a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.