Culture Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In the modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favor of laughing. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticizing the men who laugh.

G. K. Chesterton

England produces under favorable conditions of ease and culture the finest women in the world. And, as the men are affectionate and true-hearted, the women inspire and refine them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Piety is not an end but a means to attain by the greatest peace of mind the highest degree of culture.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The sight of wounded and whipped Zulus, mercilessly abandoned by their British persecutors, so appalled him that he turned full circle from his admiration for all things British to celebrating the indigenous and ethnic. He resuscitated the culture of the colonized and the fullness of Indian resistance against the British; he revived Indian handicrafts and made these into an economic weapon against the colonizer in his call for swadeshi — the use of one's own and the boycott of the oppressor's products, which deprive the people of their skills and their capital.

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

There is room for everyone; there is room for every culture, race, language and point of view.

What we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it,

George Bernard Shaw

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Henry David Thoreau

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

If you want him defined, here he is: a prime, well-fed beast such as takes medals at the cattle shows, and nothing more, he said, with a tone of vexation that interested her.
No; how so? she replied. He's seen a great deal, anyway; he's cultured?
It's an utterly different culture—their culture. He's cultivated, one sees, simply to be able to despise culture, as they despise everything but animal pleasures.

We have an alliance that was forged more than a half century ago, and strengthened by shared interests and democratic values. Our people share ties of family, ties of culture, and ties of commerce. Our troops have served to protect Japan's shores, and our citizens have found opportunity and friendship in Japan's cities and towns.

All human activity takes place within a culture and interacts with culture. For an adequate formation of a culture, the involvement of the whole man is required, whereby he exercises his creativity, intelligence, and knowledge of the world and of people. Furthermore, he displays his capacity for self-control, personal sacrifice, solidarity and readiness to promote the common good.

Pope John Paul II

I claim to represent all the cultures, for my religion, whatever it may be called, demands the fulfillment of all the cultures.

I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every child who, rather than being born, is condemned unjustly to being aborted, bears the face of Jesus Christ, bears the face of the Lord, who even before he was born, and then just after birth, experienced the world's rejection. And every elderly person…even if he is ill or at the end of his days, bears the face of Christ. They cannot be discarded, as the 'culture of waste' suggests!

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

Henry David Thoreau

Any one who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory. Good culture is born of a good disposition; and since the cause is more to be praised than the effect, I will rather praise a good disposition without culture, than good culture without the disposition.

Leonardo da Vinci

The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost. And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.

Every country and every culture has traditions that are unique and help make that country what it is. But just because something is a part of your past doesn't make it right. It doesn't mean that it defines your future. [...] Just because something is a tradition doesn't make it right.

If the world does improve on the whole, yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The most distinctive and largest contribution of Hinduism to India's culture is the doctrine of ahimsa.

The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.

Friedrich Nietzsche