Quotes About Culture

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.

There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.

To the French, [le plaisir] is a part of the general fearless and joyful contact with life.

It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

Just so; she'd even feel aggrieved. But why? Because it's against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man's again—I don't mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don't take enough interest in THEM.

These Americans, under their forthcoming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath.

Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs.

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

What do you call the weak point? He paused. The fact that the average American looks down on his wife.

a frivolous society can acquire significance through what its frivolity destroys.

Here was no retrospective pretense of an opulent past, such as the other Invaders were given to parading before the bland but undeceived subject race. The Spraggs had been plain people and had not yet learned to be ashamed of it. The

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.

For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.

You've put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they've invented has more originality than I gave it credit for.

Pero, en primer lugar, Nueva York era una metrópolis perfectamente consciente de que en las grandes capitales no era bien visto llegar temprano a la ópera; y lo que era o no era bien visto jugaba un rol tan importante en la Nueva York de Newland Archer como los inescrutables y ancestrales seres terroríficos que habían dominado el destino de sus antepasados miles de años atrás.

Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, a gentleman couldn't go into politics. But

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

Because it's against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man's again—I don't mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don't take enough interest in THEM.

Marry—but whom, in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange.

To step on board a steamer in a Spanish port, and three hours later to land in a country without a guide-book, is a sensation to rouse the hunger of the repletest sight-seer.