Quotes about Culture

“Culture is one thing and varnish is another.”

“Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.”

“Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.”

“No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.”

“Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.”

“Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.”

“In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.”

“Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.”

“Every man's ability may be strengthened or increased by culture.”

“Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.”

“That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.”

“The acquiring of culture is the development of an avid hunger for knowledge and beauty.”

“One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.”

“A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.”

“Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.”

“The manner of their living is very barbarous, because they do not eat at fixed times, but as often as they please.”

“Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.”

“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”

“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”

“General jackdaw culture, very little more than a collection of charming miscomprehensions, untargeted enthusiasms, and a general habit of skimming.”

“All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”

“We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.”

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

“Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.”

“If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.”

“Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.”

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

“Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing culture in our land.”

“Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.”

“We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.”