Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

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

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Inspirational, Wise, Wisdom

  722 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.

  84 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

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• 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

  40 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

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• 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

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

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Science, Finals, Forget

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• I am the place in which something has occurred.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

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• 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.

  58 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

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• 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

  55 Copy quote

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

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Intellectual, Poverty, Conviction

  38 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

  18 Copy quote

• Animals are good to think with.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Animal, Thinking, Dog Lover

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

  46 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

  34 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

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• 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 achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Past, Race, Ideas

  "Tristes Tropiques". Book by Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chapter 38: "A Little Glass of Rum," pp. 393, 1955.

  20 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

  25 Copy quote

• 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 individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Writing, Class, Cities

  35 Copy quote

• The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Country, People, Firsts

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• 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

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• 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 we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Music, Spring, Fall

  18 Copy quote

• 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, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Children, Order, Punishment

  "Tristes Tropiques". Book by Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chapter 38: "A Little Glass of Rum," pp. 388-389, 1955.

  34 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

  39 Copy quote

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