Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

28 quotes in 463 categories

• Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the…
• Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.
• Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.
• The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.
• Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in…
• Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.
• Animals are good to think with.
• 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,…
• I hate travelling and explorers
• Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.
• For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to…
• Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European…
• 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…
• Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize... the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the…
• There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with…
• The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of…
• The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of…
• The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.
• I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.
• Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him,…

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