Quotes About Culture

Il nazionalismo non è la consapevolezza della realtà del carattere nazionale, né l'esserne fieri: significa credere nella missione unica della propria nazione, ritenuta intrinsecamente superiore agli scopi o atttibuti di tutto ciò che è fuori di essa.

Fontenelle was the most civilized man of his time, and indeed of most times.

We took a bowl each and started eating. He went back into the little room, and by the time he returned to the table with his own bowl of food to eat with us, we had already finished. He was shocked and looked around to see if we had done something else with the food.

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

Have you ever seen people line up outside a Van Gogh exhibit? When they get inside there are so many they can't even see the paintings, they just pass by like sheep or like mourners passing the tomb of a fallen hero, a bier, with the same solemnity. And the extent of their knowledge concerning Van Gogh is that he "cut off his ear." Man, it's religion they make it into.

An Albanian's house is the dwelling of God and the guest.' Of God and the guest, you see. So before it is the house of its master, it is the house of one's guest. The guest, in an Albanian's life, represents the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations. One may pardon the man who spills the blood of one's father or of one's son, but never the blood of a guest.

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?

In museums I always enjoy stopping at the Saint Jeromes.

To be able to read the classics you have to know "from where" you are reading them; otherwise both the book and the reader will be lost in a timeless cloud.

The Sultan's wife must never remain without books that please her: a clause in the marriage contract is involved, a condition the bride imposed on her august suitor before agreeing to the wedding....

Now she is inviting you to a seminar at the university, where books are analyzed according to all Codes, Conscious and Unconscious, and in which all Taboos are eliminated, the ones imposed by the dominant Sex, Class, and Culture.

Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.

Le fiabe sono vere/Folktales are are real

Non si creda che i classici vanno letti perché "servono" a qualcosa. La sola ragione che si può addurre è che leggere i classici è meglio che non leggere i classici. E se qualcuno obietta che non val la pena di far tanta fatica, citerò Cioran: «Mentre veniva preparata la cicuta, Socrate stava imparando un'aria sul flauto. "A cosa ti servirà?" gli fu chiesto. "A sapere quest'aria prima di morire"».

You try to picture how the world might appear, this world dense with writing that surrounds us on all sides, to someone who has learned not to read.

Memory truly counts — for an individual, a society, a culture — only if it holds together the imprint of the past and the plan for the future, if it allows one to do things without forgetting what one wanted to do, and to become without ceasing to be, to be without ceasing to become.

However vast any person's basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that he has not read.

though there are some foods you don't know, mentioned by name, which the translator has decided to leave in the original; for example, schoëblintsjia

In the field of suppressed languages there are many now that attract more attention ... Basque ... Breton ... Romany.... They all sign up for those.... Not that they study the language: nobody wants to do that these days.... They want problems to debate, general ideas to connect with other general ideas. My colleagues adjust, follow the mainstream, give their courses titles like 'Sociology of Welsh,' 'Psycho-linguistics of Provençal."...

If I could, I'd dave whiffs of beautiful nights in a little pouch on my chest, the way the indians keep the scents of the prairie.

Language is the treasury of the poor.

Any knowledge of homosexuality I might have had would have gone back to Victorian times. All those novels. You probably skirted under my radar, because you weren't wearing hoop skirts and high button boots.

P3- everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs deschooling.