Quotes About Culture

Misunderstanding of the dream. In the ages of crude primeval culture man believed that in dreams he got to know another real world; here is the origin of all metaphysics.

moral judgments can never be taken literally: literally, they always contain nothing but nonsense. But they are semiotically invaluable all the same: they reveal, at least to those who are in the know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inner states that did not know enough to "understand" themselves. Morality is just a sign language, just a symptomatology: you already have to know what it's all about in order to get any use out of it.

The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.

When your sight has become good enough to see the bottom of the dark well of your being and knowing, you may also see in its mirror the distant constellations of future cultures.

May heaven have mercy on the European intellect if one wanted to subtract the Jewish intellect from it.

Humanity does not strive for happiness; only the English do.

What is the sign of every literary decadence ? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole.

Due to its lack of tranquillity, our civilisation is heading toward a new barbarism.

Culture and the state — one should not deceive oneself over this — are antagonists: the ?cultural state? is merely a modern idea. The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other. All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political.

That Luther's Reformation succeeded in the North suggests that the north of Europe was retarded compared to the south...

And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as though something would be missed if the young man of 23 were not 'finished', did not yet know the answer to the 'main question': which occupation? - A higher kind of man, if I may be forgiven for saying so, does not like 'occupations', precisely because he knows he has a calling... He has time, he takes his time, he does not even think of getting 'finished' - at thirty you are, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child.

A culture based on the principle of science must perish once it begins to become illogical, i.e. to turn and flee its own consequences.

All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political.…

All the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral.

That idyllic shepherd of modern man is only a counterfeit, the totality of cultural illusions which he counts as nature.

Ohne Mythus aber geht jede Kultur ihrer gesunden schöpferischen Kraft verlustig: erst ein mit Mythen umstellter Horizont schließt eine ganze Kulturbewegung zur Einheit ab.

It is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets for each one of us but one task: to promote the production of the philosopher, the artist and the saint within us and without us and thereby to work at the perfecting of Nature... Only when, in our present or in some future incarnation, we ourselves have been taken into that exalted order of philosophers, artists and saints, shall we also be given a new goal for our love and hate.

O meu gosto, que é provavelmente a antítese de um gosto tolerante, está longe de o poder aprovar na totalidade: em geral, aprovar não está nos meus hábitos, prefiro contradizer ou até não dizer absolutamente nada... É o que eu faço em relação a culturas inteiras, em relação a livros,- e também a cidades e paisagens.

Our age, as much as it speaks of economics, is in fact a squanderer: it squanders the most precious thing there is, the spirit.

For, why is the triumph of Nihilism inevitable now? Because the very values current amongst us to-day will arrive at their logical conclusion in Nihilism,—because Nihilism is the only possible outcome of our greatest values and ideals,—because we must first experience Nihilism before we can realise what the actual worth of these "values" was....

Shame, shame, shame—that is the history of the human!

Als 'ein Frevel, als ein Raub an der göttlichen Natur' erscheine hier die Aneignung des Feuers, der erste Schritt 'jeder aufsteigenden Kultur', und diesen 'arischen Mythus', der 'den heroischen Drang' darstelle, 'über den Bann der Individuation hinauszuschreiten', stellt er den 'semitischen Sündenfallmythus [entgegen], in welchem die Neugierde, die lügnerische Vorspiegelung, die Verführbarkeit, die Lüsternheit [...] als der Ursprung des übels angesehen wurde'.

As for civilization, it stinks.

I sometimes think that what civilized serenity the British people possess, and small but real ability to smile at themselves, is chiefly due to their good luck in having had William Shakespeare born one of their company.