Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

Quotes about:

• The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Inspirational, Wise, Wisdom

  706 Copy quote

• The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Fear, Men, Atheism

  "Homo Sapiens review - extraordinary vision of a post-human world" by Peter Bradshaw, www.theguardian.com. November 21, 2016.

  78 Copy quote

• I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Thinking, Numbers, Criticism

  57 Copy quote

• Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Men, Logic, Language

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• Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Reality, Understanding, Reducing

  38 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Musical, Language

  34 Copy quote

• I am the place in which something has occurred.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  63 Copy quote

• There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Animal, Finishing, Poison

  "Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss Remembered". "All Things Considered", www.npr.org. November 3, 2009.

  55 Copy quote

• Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Science, Finals, Forget

  68 Copy quote

• The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Science, Technology, Giving

  64 Copy quote

• Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  What Matters, Economy, Century

  71 Copy quote

• 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 universe.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Science, Men, Groups

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.390, Penguin

  51 Copy quote

• 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 wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Flower, Men, Two

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.44, Penguin

  17 Copy quote

• I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Intellectual, Poverty, Conviction

  36 Copy quote

• Animals are good to think with.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Animal, Thinking, Dog Lover

  "Totemism". Book by Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962.

  45 Copy quote

• 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 earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Country, Heart, Adventure

  32 Copy quote

• Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between the individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Philosophical, Civilization, Space

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.145, Penguin

  24 Copy quote

• 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 misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Yesterday, Historical, Development

  15 Copy quote

• With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Hands, Brain, Cameras

  24 Copy quote

• Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Knowledge, Science, Doubt

  28 Copy quote

• The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Religious, Finals, Analysis

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.232, Penguin

  18 Copy quote

• The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Loss, Effectiveness, Musician

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.121, Penguin

  11 Copy quote

• Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Rivers, Newton, Found

  35 Copy quote

• Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Fashion, Past, Knowing Nothing

  37 Copy quote

• Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Juice, Burning, Bitter

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