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Culture
Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word ...
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31 Quotation topics matching:
Filter this CollectionCulture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
- x Author:
- Matthew Arnold
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.
- x Author:
- Henry van Dyke
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.
- x Author:
- Milan Kundera
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
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.
- x Author:
- Allan Bloom
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.
- x Author:
- Jawaharlal Nehru
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio -- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how -- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home -- within the family, so to speak -- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.
- x Author:
- Daniel J. Boorstin
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.
- x Author:
- Mahatma Gandhi
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
- x Author:
- Jonathan Swift
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Culture is one thing and varnish is another.
- x Author:
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
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.
- x Author:
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
- x Author:
- Northrop Frye
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
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.
- x Author:
- Albert Camus
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
- x Author:
- Albert Camus
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
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.
- x Author:
- Karl Kraus
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.
- x Author:
- Mahatma Gandhi
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
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!
- x Author:
- Camille Paglia
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.
- x Author:
- Pablo Picasso
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
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.
- x Author:
- George Steiner
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.
- x Author:
- Henry Ward Beecher
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
- x Author:
- Thomas Wolfe
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.
- x Author:
- Edith Wharton
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
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.
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
- x Author:
- T. S. Eliot
- x Source:
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
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.
- x Author:
- Matthew Arnold
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
- x Author:
- Walter Lippmann
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers -- and in people's minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.
- x Author:
- Jean Baudrillard
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
- x Author:
- Simone Weil
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
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.
- x Author:
- Mao Zedong
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
- x Author:
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.
- x Author:
- Henry Miller
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
- x Author:
- Mary McCarthy
- x Source:
- x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):
