Quotes about Culture

Society and culture are therefore not true opponents of each other. Rather society is a species of culture that persists in contradicting itself, a freely organized attempt to conceal the freedom of the organizers and the organized, an attempt to forget that we have willfully forgotten our decision to enter this or that contest and to continue in it.

Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

Nature is the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture.

A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths.

Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance.

The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability.

So also in culture. Infinite players understand that the vigor of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others. The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.

Since culture is horizonal it is not restricted by time or space.

Since a culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other, we may say that a culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people. It is as a people that they arrange their rules with each other, their moralities, their modes of communication.

Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished.

Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun and not finished in the past.

Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilisation that made them.