Quotes About Culture

The first sign on a declining civilization is a decline in the arts.

We are all of us, men and women both, the creatures of culture: we do and feel what our societies ask us to, and the demands put upon us are not always consistent or precisely correlated with biology.

The first rule that a geisha is taught, at the age of nine, is to be charming to other women...Every girl in the world should have geisha training.

Pale pink salmon is the only color I cannot abide––although, naturally, I adore pink. I love the pale Persion pinks of the little carnations of Provence and Schiaparelli's pink, the pink of the Incas…And though it's so vieux jeu I can hardly bear to repeat it––pink is the navy blue of India.

I adore that pink, it is the navy blue of India!

The first thing to do is arrange to be born in Paris. After that, everything follows quite naturally

My family were from Jamaica.

Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.

Men are generally more law-abiding than women. Women have the feeling that since they didn't make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them.

The Victorian era produced more Victorian writers than any other period in history.

Italy will always have the best food.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

Stubborn Cajun meets stubborn Cajun. Will they get together or drown each other in the bayou? ~Ric

I've been lucky to travel through quite a bit of Europe and Australia, but I would love to do Asia and South America and South Africa.

When a people has lost homeland and liberty, their language takes the place of a nation and of everything," observed

Yet as a national spoken tongue, Italian, practically born yesterday, is nuovissimo

English may be the language everyone needs to know, but Italian is the language people want to learn. With

Americans see Italian "come una lingua polisensoriale capace di aprire le porte al bello" ("as a multi sensory language able to open the gates to beauty").

Italians basic word chest, as tallied in a recent dictionary, totals a measly 200,000, compared to English's 600,000 (not counting technical terms). But

All Italian cities have ghosts, but Florence's seem to me to be always speaking. As

As I mulled over the words of its giants, I realized that I was unconsciously moving my hands beneath my cape in the very same ways that I do when I speak Italian. And I was speaking Italian—to myself! My teachers had predicted that someday this milestone of a moment would come, that

Perhaps because of this Babel of dialects, Italians cultivated an alternative language: gestures. In

Nationalism is a phenomenon of the world after the 1789 French Revolution; it implies a common consciousness created within a consolidated territory, usually involving a single language and shared culture, producing a public rhetoric of a single national will, and with the agenda of creating or reinforcing a unitary state.