Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at… — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share Image
Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man. — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share Image
Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of… — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share Image
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,… — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share
Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich… — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share Image
These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge. — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share Image
Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us… — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share Image
“For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn’t get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so… — Claude Lévi-Strauss Copy Share
Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss. — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share Image
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions. — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share Image
“For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led… — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share Image
In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as brazilwood and pepper, which added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity... From these same… — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share
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. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel… — Claude Levi-Strauss Copy Share
