Quotes About Culture

B. A. Botkin's Lay My Burden Down and the Federal Writers' Project book, The Negro in Virginia.

The conveniences of modern culture cater exclusively to youth, and that the times grow increasingly inconsiderate of old people

I know of few greater pleasures than holding a lacquer soup bowl in my hands, feeling upon my palms the weight of the liquid and its mild warmth. The sensation is something like that of holding a plump newborn baby.

According to tradition, my great-grandfather married early, at 14, with a woman six years older. It was considered to be one of the duties of the wife to raise her husband.

Making a lot of noise was considered essential for a good wedding, as keeping quiet would have been seen as suggesting that there was something shameful about the event.

Fallowing the custom, my great-grandfather was married young, at fourteen, to a woman six years his senior. It was considered one of the duties of a wife to help bring up her husband.

A cautionary tale I had carried with me from China, and which I firmly believed, was that anyone who attempted to have a foreign lover would be drugged and carted back to China in a jute sack.

It was Cixi who championed women's liberation in a culture that had for centuries imposed foot-binding on its female population-a practice to which she put an end.

Yaban KuÄŸular? - Çin'de Üç K?zkardeÅŸ

For entertainment there were only Mao Thought Propaganda Teams, who sang Mao's quotations set to raucous music.

People are always talking about advancement and success, but going to Tokyo and living a vain, frivolous life wasn't advancement; it wasn't success.

The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose.

It will seem odd, I suppose, that I should go on in this vein, as if I too were grumbling in my dotage. Yet of this I am convinced, that the conveniences of modern culture cater exclusively to youth, and that the times grow increasingly inconsiderate of old people.

If covering our bodies with clothes represents a cultural step forward, there is no guarantee that in the future masks will not be taken equally for granted.

If I were just in trousers, somehow I could go out into the world. It would make no difference whether I was naked from the waist up and my feet bare just as long as I had trousers on. Otherwise if you go walking around the streets without trousers, no matter how new your shoes and how elegant your coat, it's enough to raise a big hue and cry. Enlightened society is a kind of trouser society.

it doesn't follow that all bearded men are bullies or heroes. There's the fortuneteller's beard, the Lenin cut, or again the European aristocrat's. And then there's the Castro beard and what is apparently the latest style—the beards sported by youngsters posing as artists, but just what that is called I don't know.

They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.

Was kann gewaltiger sein als die Zerstörung aller Bücher?

The richness of every European language is a richness in ability to describe its own culture, represent its own world. When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness.

Mythology is usually inseparable from ritual.

The word qur'an means "recitation." It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was important in Arabia. The poet was the spokesman, social historian, and cultural authority of his tribe, and over the years the Arabs had learned how to listen to a recitation and had developed a highly sophisticated critical ear.

FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH centuries were decisive for all the people of God. It was a particularly crucial period for the Christian West, which had not only succeeded in catching up with the other cultures of the Oikumene but was about to overtake them.

The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area).

as the philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."24