Quotes About Culture

The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don't believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times.

Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose their feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish: food is not the primary nourishment of man.

Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

culture consists in the sum total of efforts we make to avoid being unhappy

In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.

Cultural relativity is a pitiless weapon precisely because it sets our hero-systems up on end.

The eminent biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy wrote in a masterful essay (1955) that evolution would soon have weeded man out if his cultural categories of space, time, causality, etc., were entirely deceptive.

Better not to be oneself, better to live tucked into others, embedded in a safe framework of social and cultural obligations and duties.

the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness.

ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects

The inimitable stories of Tong-King never have any real ending, and this one, being in his most elevated style, has even less end than most of them. But the whole narrative is permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, and the two characters are both of noble birth.

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.

The strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.

Relativism does entail nihilism: if standards are inherently and inescapably expressions of something called culture, and can be nothing else, then no culture can be subjected to a standard, because (ex hypothesi) there cannot be a trans-cultural standard which would stand in judgement over it. No argument could be simpler or more conclusive.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.

Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary...

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.

To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the cafe.

Cheer up,' I said. 'All countries look just like the moving pictures.

In a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.

He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone

There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. Paris was always worth it, and you received return for whatever you brought to it…