Quotes About Culture

We residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little - handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, living herded together in pensions or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get 'done' and 'through' and go somewhere else. The result is they mix up towns, rivers, palaces in one inextricable whirl.

We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.

an Italian can never be ignored, least of all when he has a grievance.

I have always been like the Greeks and didn't know.

Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions—her own soul.

They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.

He had no racial feeling—not because he was superior to his brother civilians, but because he had matured in a different atmosphere, where the herd instinct does not flourish.

A matter neither sensual nor sensational is ignored by the art of today.

London only stimulates, it cannot sustain

Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn't die in the room where they were born?

But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light...

For all his culture, Cecil was an ascetic at heart, and nothing in his love became him like the leaving of it.

I love folklore and all festering superstitions.

Why? Why were most big things unladylike?

Every barbarian must give the Acropolis its chance once.

He felt that the English are a comic institution, and enjoyed being misunderstood by them.

He was a good average Englishman who had slipped.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!" bowing right and left. "Look at that adorable wine-cart! How the driver stares at us, dear, simple soul!

He loved poetry--science was merely an acquisition, which he laid aside when unobserved like his European dress...

If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. No--perhaps not even that. Without their spirit life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it.

Ronny was ruffled. From his mother's description he had thought the doctor might be young Muggins from over the Ganges, and had brought out all the comradely emotions. What a mix-up! Why hadn't she indicated by the tone of her voice that she was talking about an Indian?

Uma noite, pouco antes das dez horas, escapou-se para Trinity e aguardou no Grande Claustro que os portões se fechassem atrás dele. (...) Estava no meio de homens de Trinity - todos de imensa inteligência e cultura. O grupo de Maurice gozava com Trinity, mas não podiam ignorar o seu esplendor arrogante, ou negar a superioridade que mal se dá ao trabalho de se afirmar. ----------------------------------------------------- P.38, MAURICE, E.M. FORSTER

Granted the exceptions, he agreed that all Englishwomen are haughty and venal.