Quotes About Culture And Literature

#1. It goes without saying that before its culture and literature can continue to evolve, Latvia first must endure the political comedy of creating a stable, functioning and unthreatened democracy.

Amity Gaige

#2. Isn't connecting people to distant lands and culture one of the strengths of good literature?

Elif Shafak

#3. Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

Oscar Wilde

#4. Sports is like literature. People watch it and if it's beautiful and it's non-violent, whatever messages that you see, people can read into it and say, "Wow! You know what? Whatever they're doing over there, it's extraordinary, and maybe that culture is superior to ours in certain ways."

Gabe Polsky

#5. And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.

Richard Mitchell

#6. The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

Kenzaburo Oe

#7. What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

George Bernard Shaw

#8. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own.

Yu Hua

#9. For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.

Yukio Mishima

#10. Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

#11. Stories
from the literature of our culture to descriptions of our days to the lunatic's ravings
appear to be hardwired into us. Even in sleep we tell ourselves stories through our dreams, and it's been shown that those who are prevented from doing so cease to function.

Michael Ruhlman

#12. We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

M.H. Abrams

#13. The whole world recognizes Russia's cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

Vladimir Putin

#14. To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

Susan Sontag

#15. People are talking high of Thiruvalluvar. But in practice they do not respect his teachings. They act against him and disregard him.

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

#16. When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.

Tom Robbins

#17. The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

Lionel Trilling

#18. How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

Polly Toynbee

#19. It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

M.H. Abrams

#20. My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.

Jose Rizal

#21. To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

Oscar Wilde

#22. A nation could change its way of life, its history, its technology, its art, literature, and culture, but it would never have a real chance to change its gestures.

Orhan Pamuk

#23. The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

Roger Scruton

#24. We build this country ourselves every day and we have to be, in the most positive sense, totally unreal.

J.C. Villamere

#25. F you could forget mortality ... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.

Wallace Stegner

#26. From the beginning of church history, music, writing, literature, and the greatest works of art all came from the church. To change the culture and make it a force for good, you have to be in it and be a part of it.

Patricia Heaton

#27. Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.

James Joyce

#28. I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.

David Plotz

#29. ...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.
And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.

Ettore Scola

#30. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.

Henry David Thoreau

#31. It's hard to know what [literature] will end up being timeless and what will be something that doesn't translate into the future, especially with the way we're evolving since our culture is changing so fast.

Rick Riordan

#32. It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics.

Orhan Pamuk

#33. I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.

Martin Scorsese

#34. Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.

Richard Brookhiser

#35. Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word.

Ian Shoales

#36. My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.

Nick Clegg

#37. Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.

Richard Flanagan

#38. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#39. Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve.

Alfred Kazin

#40. Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.

Rafael Sabatini

#41. I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.

Muhammad Iqbal

#42. To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.

George Washington

#43. Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so ... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

Haruki Murakami

#44. Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas.

Semen Frank

#45. The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

Richard Dawkins

#46. In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.

Steve Erickson

#47. The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Iris Murdoch

#48. I'm not sure many writers are trying to reconcile all the things that are separated in our culture - body and mind, urban and pastoral, lyricism and hardboiled, men and women, joy and grief. I tried to do quite a lot, but I wanted to create a serious work of literature.

Nicola Griffith

#49. I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

Helen Dunmore

#50. People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture they were brought up in. People have attention spans of five seconds and as much depth as a glass of water.

David Bowie

#51. White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

Ntozake Shange

#52. You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich.

Robert Duvall

#53. I first came to Russia because of the culture, literature and music ... and my interest in the 19th-century revolutionary spirit of Herzen, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Russia is a wonderful place to bring new clowns because Russians give back a wonderful response.

Patch Adams

#54. I claim that every woman in this century and in our culture sphere who has ventured into male-dominated institutions - 'literature' and 'aesthetics' are such institutions - must have experienced the desire for self-destruction.

Christa Wolf

#55. Our thoughts of literary renaissance should always center themselves on the removal of superstition, meanness, indignity and ignorance.

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

#56. My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.

Mo Yan

#57. Even before Europe was united in an economic level or was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries of Europe. The arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe.

Dario Fo

#58. Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.

Alan Moore

#59. I think the more you understand myths, the more you understand the roots of our culture and the more things will resonate. Do you have to know them? No, but certainly it is nice to recognise how deeply these things are embedded in our literature, our art.

Rick Riordan