Quotes About Culture

It is the intense spirituality of India, and not any great political structure or social organisation that it has developed, that has enabled it to resist the ravages of time and the accidents of history.

I don't actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I'm beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.

There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way.

There haven't been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens.

The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know.

Roumanian is an easy language. You just add a tl to everything.

The people who come to evening classes are only ostensibly after culture. Their great need, their hunger, is for good sense, clarity, truth – even an atom of it. People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to carry home when day is done.

what people called culture was nothing but a fancier term for their ignorance.

Without teaching, Jewry was an impossibility.

France, they have no life at home, home is disgusting, and they need to see themselves in a French light only. This applies to somebody like Cioran or even our friend—your friend—Grielescu. They hope to turn into Frenchmen. But your wife is even more peculiar . .

Now I was too old to be a pupil, and Ravelstein didn't believe in adult education. It was far too late for me to Platonize. And what people called culture was nothing but a fancier term for their ignorance.

I read the best of literature, science and philosophy

Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans. But old cultures are impermeable and exclusive—none more so than the French.

Arabs are harvesting

Arab boys singing their lessons.

The very Orthodox Professor Harold Fisch, bearded and wearing a skullcap, tells me that "the liberated territories" must be colonized and reclaimed by the Jews. The West Bank is Promised Land. For that matter the East Bank is, too. Professor Fisch, English by birth and dean of something or other at the new university in Beersheba, has no patience with the objections I offer. He tells me fiercely in his Oxbridge voice that we American Jews are not Jews at all.

Israelis must, in fact, bear in mind four thousand years of Jewish history. The world has been thrown into their arms and they are required to perform an incredible balancing act.

AM fascinated by the profusion and ingenuity of Jewish ideas on the future of Israel.

Although she never went to the synagogue...Grandma [Lausch], all the same, burned a candle on the anniversary of Mr. Lausch's death, threw a lump of dough on the coals when she was baking, a kind of offering, had incantations over baby teeth and stunts against the evil eye. It was kitchen religion and had nothing to do with the G-d of the Creation who turned back the waters and exploded Gomorrah, but it was on the side of religion at that.

Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us.

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?

Better a thousand times the Arab untouched. The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn.

Under orders from Kitchener himself, an attempt was to be made to bribe the Turkish commander of the Kut siege into letting Townshend's army go in return for one million English pounds' worth of gold. If Lawrence resented being the bearer of this shameful instruction, almost without precedent in British military history, he never let on. Then again, he'd very recently been given two reminders of the puffery and hypocrisy of military culture.

For his part, Frank Wisner never truly regarded himself as a Southerner except, his middle son, Ellis, recalled, on those occasions when outsiders denigrated the region. "That's when he got his back up," Ellis Wisner recalled. "If people made fun of it, that's when he became a Southerner.