Quotes About Culture

Here are two chairs; let us sit down and see the smart people go by.

Más de la mitad de la cultura moderna depende de lo que no debería leerse

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.

Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One's own life—that is the important thing. As for the lives of one's neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern. Besides, individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.

Firewater brings out the real brownness of this buffalo.

All through schools, jobs, and bumming, I haven't even held the hand of a Mexican woman, excepting whores who are all the same anyhow

The broads are fantastic…the bulging breasts of these savage wenches who move with graceful twists. Since I have come to L.A. I have not touched a woman of my own culture. I swallow my milk and feel my pants bursting with heat

Seven fine broads are at his side. They sing songs of the Mexican Revolution which they learned from their grandmothers

A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.

Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.

Harlem was home; was where we belonged; where we knew and were known in return; where we felt most alive; where, if need be, somebody had to take us in. Harlem defined us, claiming our consciousness and, I suspect, our unconsciousness. (Page 64)

Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.

Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike, and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself.

In place of a true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman...

Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis. (In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.)

By faithful study of the nobler arts, our nature's softened, and more gentle grows.

Male beauty's better for neglect.

All human culture is but an attempt at something unattainable, something which far transcends our powers of realization. There it stands, mutilated, tragic as a torso. Is not the human spirit itself a torso?

Hol a saját (irodalmi) múltunk tudatos számbavétele? Egy nyugati könyvesboltban tényleg sírva lehet fakadni: Goethe elölrÅ'l, Goethe hátulról, férfival, kisgyerekkel, kecskével, hajnalban, Schillerrel, Thomas Mann-nal, futólag Kleisttel. Ahogy egy kultúra birtokba veszi önmagát...

the march of civilisation has given the modern girl a vocabulary and an ability to use it which her grandmother never had

Aye, wumman, if it's truly romantic, then it must be Scottish

Bertie, do you read Tennyson? Not if I can help.

Don't they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?' 'Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.