Quotes About Culture

I reverently fondled the silky volumes of a certain Chinese encyclopaedia whose finely brushed characters seemed to me more mysterious than the spots on a leopard's skin.

Un idioma es una tradición, un modo de sentir la realidad, no un arbitrario repertorio de símbolos. (A language is a tradition, a way of grasping reality, not an arbitrary assemblage of symbols.)

Cada lenguaje es una tradición, cada palabra, un símbolo; es baladí lo que un innovador es capaz de alterar...

Todo lenguaje es un alfabeto de símbolos cuyo ejercicio presupone un pasado que los interlocutores comparten.

para los antiguos la palabra escrita no era otra cosa que un sucedáneo de la palabra oral.

Football is popular because stupidity is popular.

Football is one of England's biggest crimes.

I am returning to the language my ancestors spoke fifty generations ago; I am returning to that language; I am reclaiming it. It is not the first time I speak it; when I had other names this was the language I spoke.

Of all the towns in the world, Geneva seems to be the place where people could come closest to happiness

R?d?cina limbii este iraÈ›ional? È™i are un caracter magic. Danezul care articula numele lui Thor ori saxonul care articula numele lui Thunor nu È™tiau dac? aceste cuvinte însemnau zeul tunetului sau zgomotul care urmeaz? fulgerul. Poezia vrea s? se întoarc? la aceast? magie veche

When a country has a strong spirit, foreign and exotic influences do not debilitated that spirit, they strengthen it. - German Literature in the Age of Bach

Chess is one of the means we have to save culture, such as Latin, the study of the humanities, the reading of classics, the laws of versification and ethics. Chess is now replaced by football, boxing or tennis, which are games of fools, not of intellectuals.

El tema de la envidia es muy español. Los españoles siempre están pensando en la envidia. Para decir que algo es bueno dicen: Es envidiable.

There is nothing more characteristic of a country than its imaginations. - Prologue to The Tiger Guest, P'u Sung-ling

Hay quienes hablan un idioma con muchas eses, que ha de ser español, puesto que quienes lo hablan son despreciados.

El ajedrez es uno de los medios que tenemos para salvar la cultura, como el latín, el estudio de las humanidades, la lectura de los clásicos, las leyes de la versificación, la ética. El ajedrez es hoy reemplazado por el fútbol, el boxeo o el tenis, que son juegos de insensatos, no de intelectuales.

Get hold of a copy of Heine's Buck der Lieder—that should be easily done—get hold of a German-English dictionary, and then begin to read. You may be puzzled at first, but after two or three months you will find yourself reading the finest poetry in the world and perhaps not understanding it but feeling it, which is far better, since poetry is not meant for reason but for the imagination.

Mi deplorable condición de argentino me impedirá incurrir en el ditirambo — género obligatorio en el Uruguay—, cuando el tema es un uruguayo.

Porque todo hombre culto es un teólogo, y para serlo no es indispensable la fe

Aku membayangkan bahwa surga itu merupakan sebuah perkampungan sederhana yang di tengahnya terdapat perpustakaan besar dan berisi buku-buku dari berbagai zaman dan bangsa.

We are the people birthed from this land. For the first time I can seem something I've not fully understood before, not until now as these pale creatures from somewhere far away stare down at us in wonder, trying to makes sense of what they see. We are this place. This place is us.

Lots of times growing up, I'd just try to do something myself because I believed that being a boy, and being Indian, I should just know how to do things. -Will Bird, Through Black Spruce

We are the people birthed from this land. For the first time I can see something I've not fully understood before, not until now as these pale creatures from somewhere far away stare down at us in wonder, trying to make sense of what they see. We are this place. This place is us.

It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).