Culture

British poet and critic Matthew Arnold viewed “culture” as the cultivation of the humanist ideal.

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning “to cultivate”) is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of “culture” in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word “culture” is most commonly used in three basic senses:

• Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
• An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
• The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group

When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term “culture” to refer to a universal human capacity. For the German nonpositivist sociologist, Georg Simmel, culture referred to “the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history”.

Famous  Quotes on Culture

Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.
Camille Paglia

Quotes on Culture

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

Roland Barthes

Culture
The fact is popular art dates. It grows quaint. How many people feel strongly about Gilbert and Sullivan today compared to those who felt strongly in 1890?
Stephen Sondheim

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.
George Steiner

There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today’s pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.
Charles Krauthammer

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.
Stephen Vizinczey

Every man’s ability may be strengthened or increased by culture.

John Abbott (1821-1893) Canadian lawyer and statesman.

That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) American politician.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) French novelist, essayist and dramatist.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) French novelist, essayist and dramatist.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) U.S. poet, essayist and lecturer.

If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Spanish painter.

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.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Irish-born English satirist.

Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.

Simone Weil (1910-1943) French Philosopher

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) Preeminent leader of Indian nationalism.

Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of ”quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.

Northrop Frye