Quotes About Culture

The seven years I spent with the Arabs convinced me that the neurotics, the insane, the drunks of America and Europe are the product of the hurried and harassed lives we live in our so-called civilization.

Love means will-to-good, willing the benefit of what or who is loved. We may say we love chocolate cake, but we don't. Rather, we want to eat it. That is desire, not love. In our culture we have a great problem distinguishing between love and desire, but it is essential that we do so.

How unbearably tragic it would be, though, if the millions of Asia, South America and Africa were led to believe that the best we can hope for from The Way of Christ is the level of Christianity visible in Europe and America today

La idea de que puedes confiar en Cristo sin decidir obedecerle es una ilusión generada por el predominio de una «cultura cristiana» descreída. De hecho, no puedes confiar en Jesús sin determinar obedecerle más de lo que podrías confiar en tu médico y en el mecánico de tu coche sin determinar seguir su consejo.

Christian spiritual formation is inescapably a matter of recognizing in ourselves the idea systems of evil that govern the present age and respective culture, as well as those that constitute life away from God.

The "Western" segment of the church today lives in a bubble of historical illusion about the meaning of discipleship and the gospel. We are dominated by the essentially Enlightenment values that rule American culture: pursuit of happiness, unrestricted freedom of choice, disdain of authority.

They do not know what they are doing and do not have the ability to distance themselves from it so they can see it for what it is. That is the power of "culture.

Consider a daily newspaper or television newscast and eliminate from it every report that presupposes a breaking of one of the Ten Commandments. Very little will be left.

But myth making, as it turns out, is not the sole prerogative of religion. It is also a very active secular and academic pastime—and a human one as well; perhaps it is some kind of human necessity.

our minds have come down to us through history

As creators and consumers they fill the field of pop culture today, which is an economic enterprise and only by accident occasionally has something to do with art. Art objects are now commonly referred to as "product" by those who handle them and only make news when they are sold for absurdly large sums or are stolen.

Anthropologists observe that the world occupied by a human being comprises not only the surrounding land, water, sky, plant and animal life, human beings and works of human hands, but also a "symbolic reality," which is superimposed upon material reality.

As far as expressing the creative turmoil within my head was concerned, I took to the English language as a duck takes to water. I was therefore a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonisation.

Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of predujice.

And your students," Sato demanded, "don't find it unnerving that Masons meditate with skulls and scythes?" "No more unnerving than Christians praying at the feet of a man nailed to a cross, or Hindus chanting in front of a four-armed elephant named Ganesh. Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of prejudice

The world had gone mad, and in may parts of Europe, advertising your love of Jesus Christ was like painting a bull's-eye on the roof of your car.

Anthropological data clearly showed that cultures practicing religions historically had outlived nonreligious cultures. Fear of being judged by an omniscient deity always helps inspire benevolent behavior.

The early Greeks had to look back centuries to study ancient culture, but we need look back only a single generation to find those who lived without the technologies we take for granted today.

Langdon always ended this lecture with a reminder that Arab culture had also given mankind the word al-kuhl—the favorite beverage of Harvard freshmen—known as alcohol.

No more unnerving than Christians praying at the feet of a man nailed to a cross, or Hindus chanting in front of a four-armed elephant named Ganesh. Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of prejudice.

The goal of tattooing was never beauty. The goal was change.

It is a messy process for a culture to abandon its dieties. Sprititual beliefs are etched deeply on our psyches at a young age by those we love and trust most --- our parents, our teachers, our religious leaders. Therefore, any religious shifts occur over generations, and not without great angst, and often bloodshed. - Robert Langdon

many of the stars bearing names beside them: Vega, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Algebar, Deneb, Acrab, Kitalpha. "Their names are all derived from Arabic," Edmond said. "To this day, more than two-thirds of the stars in the sky have names from that language because they were discovered by astronomers in the Arab world.

He thought about science, about faith, about man. He thought about how every culture, in every country, in every time, had always shared one thing. We all had the Creator. We used different names, different faces, and different prayers, but God was the universal constant for man. God was the symbol we all shared . . . the symbol of all the mysteries of life that we could not understand. The ancients had praised God as a symbol of our limitless human potential