Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

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.

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

The wise man is not he who gives the right answers; he is the one who asks the right questions.

I am the place in which something has occurred.

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.

The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

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.

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

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time ...

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 them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space.

[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world ... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.

Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.

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

Either I can be like some traveler of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveler, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality ... A few hundred years hence, in this same place another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

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

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.

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

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

I can't help thinking that science would be more appealing if it had no practical use.

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable.

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.

These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.

Animals are good to think with.

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

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.

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

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.

Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.

No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.

In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.

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.

[ Serialism ] is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination ...

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

For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn't get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so complicated that one wondered how it could possibly be unravelled; and then suddenly one note would resolve the whole problem, and the solution would seem yet more audacious than the procedures which had preceded, called for, and made possible its arrival; when it was heard, all that had gone before took on a new meaning, and the quest, which had seemed arbitrary, was seen to have prepared the way for this undreamed-of solution.

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.

From time to time, too, and for the space of two or three paces, an image or an echo would rise up from the recesses of time: in the little streets of the beaters of silver and gold, for instance, there was a clear, unhurried tinkling, as if a djinn with a thousand arms was absent-mindedly practising on a xylophone.

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.

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 appearance of writing

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