Quotes About Culture

For Indians, chai resolves most things, consoles for the things it can't.

Had supposed India was essentially unfathomable: it was too fast, too swiftly changing to yield to any categorisation. In Varanasi, however, I found a city whose spirit seemed to denote the whole.

Our history is responsible for the differences in the South African way of life.

Boy children are primed to expect everything from their wives in the marriage, and not give too much if anything at all.

One night I'll be in Los Angeles and it'll be a Latin crowd, and then another night I'll go to Fresno and it'll be an all-black crowd. To me, that's the beauty of the music.

The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these, it is said, are of the greatest service or of the greatest injury to the dead man, at the very beginning of his journey thither.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

El idiota suele ser buen lector, pero generalmente, de malos libros. No lee de izquierda a derecha, como los occidentales, ni de derecha a izquierda, como los orientales. Se las ha arreglado para leer de izquierda a izquierda

Pese a que en los estratos medios y altos hay los ingredientes culturales capaces de ver con toda lucidez las calamidades que produce el populismo, los sectores marginales de la sociedad, que en América Latina son mayoritarios, permanecen —gracias a las continuas prebendas que reciben— fieles a quienes dicen que ejercen el poder en su nombre y en contra de los privilegiados.

There is always something new out of Africa.

Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.

man by nature is not a wild or unsocial creature, neither was he born so, but makes himself what he naturally is not, by vicious habit; and that again on the other side, he is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as beasts themselves that are wild by nature, become tame and tractable by housing and gentler usage...

Numa forbade the Romans to revere an image of God which had the form of man or beast. Nor was there among them in this earlier time any painted or graven likeness of Deity, 8 but while for the first hundred and seventy years they were continually building temples and establishing sacred shrines, they made no statues in bodily form for them, convinced that it was impious to liken higher things to lower, and that it was impossible to apprehend Deity except by the intellect.

Most people would live in an outhouse in Bangladesh before they would voluntarily move to Nebraska.

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

Asian philosophy and culture never endured an intellectual upheaval like the Cartesian split of mind and body that brought the so-called Enlightenment to the West. The consequent achievements of scientific method and the less fortunate by-products of secular self-interest together laid the groundwork, in Europe and America, for the personal psychology of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

T]here are more and more Western scholars who [...] strive to experience Buddhism directly in the Eastern countries where it has long been a central element of cultural tradition. They must be clearly distinguished from those Westerners who, unable or unwilling to confront themselves with their own Western tradition, frivolously escape to any different world.

There is no inherent awakening power in cultural forms that have become dissociated from the wisdom and practicality that gave birth to them. They turn into illusions themselves and become part of the drama of religious culture.

The culture of life means respect for nature and protection of God's work of creation. In a special way it means respect for human life from the first moment of conception until its natural end.

I have a sweet tooth for song and music. This is my Polish sin.

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

Untainted by overbearing nationalistic pride of any trace of racial discrimination, experts should learn how to work in collaboration with everyone else. They must realize technical knowledge does not give them superiority in every sphere of life. Their own culture does contain certain universal human elements, but it cannot be regarded as the only culture, nor can it regard other cultures with a haughty disdain.

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals