A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!
Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building — like Tower Bridge — or a classical front put on a steel frame — like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living — not something added, like sugar on a pill.
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
Culture is one thing and varnish is another.
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.
Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.
Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.
Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ''retro'' clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.
Every man's ability may be strengthened or increased by culture.
For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
General jackdaw culture, very little more than a collection of charming miscomprehensions, untargeted enthusiasms, and a general habit of skimming.
Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers — and in people's minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.