Claude Lévi-Strauss Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize — because they set so little store by them — the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Logically, the "infantilization" of the culprit implied by the notion of punishment demands that he should have a corresponding right to a reward, in the absence of which the initial procedure will prove ineffective and may even lead to results contrary to those that were hoped for. Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation; and we believe we have made great spiritual progress because, instead of eating a few of our fellow-men, we subject them to physical and moral mutilation.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining....

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The police are not entrusted with a mission which differentiates them from those they serve. Being unconcerned with ultimate purposes, they are inseparable from the persons and interests of their masters, and shine with their reflected glory.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when we have separated them from this dross.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Language is a form of human reason, and has its reasons which are unknown to man.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real).

Claude Lévi-Strauss
[Serialism] is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination.…

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The idea behind structuralism is that there are things we may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other. This has been used by science since it existed and can be extended to a few other studies — linguistics and mythology — but certainly not to everything.
The great speculative structures are made to be broken. There is not one of them that can hope to last more than a few decades, or at most a century or two.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are "good to eat" but because they are "good to think."

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Adventure has no place in the anthropologists profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or month.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.

Claude Lévi-Strauss