Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Culture means control over nature.
You only live a short time... and you are dead a long time.
If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.
A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.
History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.
No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.
In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.
The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.
Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
Culture requires in the first place a certain balance of material and spiritual values.
Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.
The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.
What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.
The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
Whatever our creed or belief, we all know that there is no way back, that we must fight our way through.
In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.
The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
There are no instances known to me of cultures having forsaken Truth or renounced the understanding in its widest sense.
Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?
Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
Educators are aware that they can reach the youth only by making use of gang spirit and guiding it, not by working against it.
The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.
An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.
Whether the aim is in heaven or on earth, wisdom or wealth, the essential condition of its pursuit and attainment is always security and order.
These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.
Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment of all ethical standards.
The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.
Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.
History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.
Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.
All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind.
From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment.
Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.
One does not realize the historical sensation as a re-experiencing, but as an understanding that is closely related to the understanding of music, or rather of the world by means of music.
Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.
But one sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused and, fora moment lifted everything into an ordered sphere: that of the bells.
The art of watching has become mere skill at rapid apperception and understanding of continuously changing visual images. The younger generation has acquired this cinematic perception to an amazing degree.