Quotations on Culture
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, I, 1869 [source: Esar]
Cutlure looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, -- the passion for sweetness and light.
Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, pref., 1873 [source: Esar]
Culture is to "know the best that has been said and thought in the world."
Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, pref., 1873 [source: Esar]
That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.
Henry Ward Beecher [source: Correct Quotes]
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture.
Samuel Butler [source: Esar]
Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties -- it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.
Aime Cesair, Martiniquen writer, speaking to the World Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris [source: Petras and Petras]
Culture, with us, ends in headache.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience, 1841 [source: Esar]
No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.
Mahatma Gandhi [source: Correct Quotes]
Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.
Mahatma Gandhi [source: Correct Quotes]
Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. ...For this reason, 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.
Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Bk. v, ch. 1 (Carlyle, tr.) [source: Stevenson]
Rather than by your culture spoiled,
Desist, and give us nature wild.
Matthew Green, The Spleen, l. 248 [source: Stevenson]
Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats.
Aldous Huxley [source: Flesch]
Culture is but the fine flowering of real education, and it is the training of the feeling the tastes and the manners that makes it so.
Minnie Kellogg, Iroquois leader [source: Petras and Petras]
The poor have no business with culture and should beware of it. They cannot eat it; they cannot sell it; they can only pass it on to others and that is why the world is full of hungry people ready to teach us anything under the sun.
Aubrey Menen [source: Flesch]
A cultivated mind is one to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, II, 1863. [source: Esar]
Culture is what your butcher would have if he were a surgeon.
Mary Pettibone Poole, A Glass Eye at a Keyhole (1938). [source: Maggio]
The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.
Seneca, Epistulae ad Lucilium. Epis. ii, sec. 1. [source: Stevenson]
Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.
Henry van Dyke [source: Stevenson]
Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (1949) [source: Maggio]
Are not the processes of culture rapidly creating a class of supercilious infidels, who believe in nothing? Shall a man lose himself in countless masses of adjustments, and be so shaped with reference to this, that, and the other, that the simply good and healthy and brave parts of him are reduced and clipp'd away, like the bordering of a box in a garden?
Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1870 [source: Esar]
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