Quotes About Culture

Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.

The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.

Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.

For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800 on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of "world" history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), which in his "world" history are epoch-making.

unalert yet sometimes suffused through and through by an inward light, is characteristic of the primitive and of the child (and also of those moments of religious and artistic inspiration that occur ever less and less often as a Culture grows older) right

In other words: what we call history is the specific form in which the cycles of nature are acted out in man-made form. A quote from Goethe comes to mind as particularly illustrative: 'Colour is a law of nature in relation with the sense of sight.'[2] By analogy we might say with Spengler that culture is a law of nature in relation with human minds (the plural is an important qualification here).

At all times and in all places, the men and women of every culture deserve each other.

The man makes History, the woman is History.

Civilization is the ultimate destiny of the Culture… Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion… petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood.

Societies decline when the upper classes emulate the lower classes.

The birth of the Ego, and of the world-anxiety with which it is identical, is one of the final secrets of humanity and of mobile life generally. In front of the Microcosm there stands up a Macrocosm wide and overpowering, an abyss of alien, dazzling existence and activity that frightens the small lonely ego back into itself...Over the dawn of the new Culture likewise lay this deathly anxiety.

Men of a future Culture, with other souls and other passions, will hardly be able to resist the conviction that 'in those days' Nature herself was tottering.

a town that smelled of chicken guts, hog manure, and rampant incest, which seemed to be the three main industries.

Polite lies, polite lies! They are the decorous garment, and the fitting food, of the world. To be in the fashion, I shall have to treat you to them before I have done.

Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.

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

Therefore it is only people living in the same period and, broadly speaking, in the same community, who inhabit the same world. People living in other periods, or even at the same period but in a totally different community, do not inhabit the same world about which they have different ideas, they inhabit different worlds altogether.

In most societies, organized religion provides a culturally acceptable framework for rationalizing the continuance of magical thinking.

Perhaps the Irish are so rich in the voice because twas the only thing the English could not take from them. It is why the Welsh sing.

At the court hearing, Howard Weitzman told the judge that if they were gonna ban 'Suicide Solution' and hold me responsible for some poor kid shooting himself, then they'd have to ban Shakespeare, 'cos Romeo and Juliet's about suicide, too.

If you want to be a fucking individual, don't get a tattoo. Every fucker's got one these days.

Bartók. Blame it on Bartók. Or the bossanova.

Most a barátom kiáltott föl: - Egyébként még sosem ettem ebben az országban egy jó Esterházy-rostélyost. - Vállat vontam, tekints zicsinek.

Alcohol is a misunderstood vitamin.