Culture Quotes

“To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople: to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories.”

“Everything that is popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of philosophers: and this is for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people.”

“It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.”

“Report of fashions in proud Italy Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation Limps after in base imitation”

“Everyone has a right to pronounce foreign names as he chooses.”

“Where the banana grows man is sensual and cruel.”

“Irving Wallace wrote a bestselling novel, The Man, in the 1960s about a black man becoming president of the United States. We thought that such a possibility was thousands of years in the future. Some people may still have some difficulty with the idea, but that's a major cultural meme shift.”

“The arts are essen­tial to any com­plete national life. The State owes it to itself to sus­tain and encour­age them. [...] Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the rev­er­ence and delight which are their due.”

“We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.”

“Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.”

“In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.”

“We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.”

“The Englishman who has lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart.”

“America is not civil, whilst Africa is barbarous.”

“America is a country of young men.”

“A love of tradition has never weakened a nation.”

“We shape our homes and then our homes shape us.”

“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”

“Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.”

“The man who disparages music as a luxury and non-essential is doing the nation an injury. Music now, more than ever before, is a national need.”

“The most beautiful voice in the world is that of an educated Southern woman.”

“If there is a gratification which I envy any people in this world it is to your country [Italy] its music. This is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.”

“The superiority of chocolate (hot chocolate), both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain.”

“The highest end of government is the culture of men.”

“Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.”