Another Culture Quotes

The only way to understand another culture is to assume the frame of reference of that culture. ~ Carl R. Rogers

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I'd become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong. ~ Lily King

It's a lot easier to see what's irrational in another culture than it is to see it in our own. ~ Cheryl Chase

We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture. ~ Edward T. Hall

It was in this way he asked people to enter another realm of the mind. Places far away, and mysterious, brought to them by details which they did not understand but which entranced them. ~ Paulette Jiles

Good storytelling is one thing rural whites and Indians have in common. But native Americans have learned through harsh necessity that people who survive encroachment by another culture need story to survive. And a storytelling tradition is something Plains people share with both ancient and contemporary monks; we learn our ways of being and reinforce our values by telling tales about each other. ~ Kathleen Norris

we can never really experience what other people are experiencing. We always remain on the outside looking in, and this is the cause of so many misunderstandings and conflicts. But the primal source of human intelligence comes from the development of mirror neurons (see here), which gives us the ability to place ourselves in the skin of another and imagine their experience. Through continual exposure to people and by attempting to think inside them we can gain an increasing sense of their perspective, but this requires effort on our part. Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own beliefs and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware. When it comes to studying another culture, it is only through the use of our empathic powers and by participating in their lives that we can begin to overcome these natural projections and arrive at the reality of their experience. ~ Robert Greene

The way we are conditioned to see the world in our own culture seems so completely obvious and commonplace that it is difficult to image that another culture might do things differently. It is only when you start to identify what is typical in your culture but different from others, that you can begin to open a dialogue of sharing, learning, and ultimately understanding. ~ Erin Meyer

As with Cesc Fabregas, some players who go and play for foreign clubs improve on a cultural level. It makes them grow on many levels; intellectually, because you have to learn a new language and adapt to another culture, and on a footballing level too. ~ Vicente Del Bosque

A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new. ~ T.C. Boyle

Complexity and profundity have been equated by the academic culture just as fame and significance have been conflated by the popular culture. Fame and significance have nothing to do with one another; and complexity and profundity have nothing to do with one another. ~ Dennis Prager

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture. ~ Alain De Botton

Too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowning. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. ~ Rebecca Solnit

When interacting with someone from another culture, try to watch more, listen more, and speak less. ~ Erin Meyer

When I speak of Spanglish I'make talking about a fertile terrain for negotiating a new identity. I'make feeling excited, as Gloria Anzldua did in her book Borderlands/LA Frontera,about "participating in the creation of another culture/in a state of perpetual transition/with a tolerance for ambiguity. ~ Ed Morales

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture. ~ Djimon Hounsou

the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. Often ~ Rebecca Solnit

The richness of every European language is a richness in ability to describe its own culture, represent its own world. When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

Alice Kaplan is a teacher of French language and literature, and she has done this kind of remembering in a book called French Lessons. "Why do people want to adopt another culture?" she asks as she summarizes her journey into teaching and into life. "Because there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't name them."5 ~ Parker J. Palmer

This education has reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage ... What about our own roots? ... I am up against the system, the whole method and approach of a system of education which makes us morons, cultural morons, but efficient clerks for all your business and administration offices. ~ R.K. Narayan

I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything - I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it's like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that's what they were doing; it's like a message from another culture. ~ Jonathan Dee

While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture. "Passing over," a term used by the theologian John Dunne, describes the process through which reading enables us to try on, identify with, and ultimately enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of another person's consciousness. When we pass over into how a knight thinks, how a slave feels, how a heroine behaves, and how an evildoer can regret or deny wrongdoing, we never come back quite the same; sometimes we're inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched. Through this exposure we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts -- that we are individuals, but not alone. ~ Maryanne Wolf

As art reveals the artist more than the world, so you see yourself and what you are not in the mirror of another culture. ~ Jennifer Stone

I am up against the system, the whole method & approach of a system of education which makes us morons, cultural morons, but efficient clerks for all your business and administrative offices. This education had reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings & garbage ... ~ R.K. Narayan

... to wander far from the familiar "home" of his adolescent ways of belonging, doing, and being. He must, as poet Mary Oliver puts it, "stride deeper and deeper into the world." His culture will greatly influence the manner in which he wanders, as will his gender, physical constitution, psychological temperament, age, and bio-region. In one culture, his wandering might take him geographically far from his hometown or village. In another culture, geographic movement will have little importance for the true depth of his wandering. What is critical is not whether he engages in this practice or that, or undergoes this ritual or another, but that his wandering changes his relationship to the world, that he leaves the home of his adolescent identity, and that his border crossings usher him into the mysteries of nature and psyché. ~ Bill Plotkin

Another culture can be learned in the classroom for a single term, but it can be felt from a person for a lifetime. ~ Chelsea Sexton

Early 1990s, Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, attracted international notice with her book You Just Don't Understand. Her book, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for over four years, argued that men and women often talk past each other without appreciating that the other sex is almost another culture. Women, for example, are highly attentive to the thoughts and feelings of others; men are less so. Women view men's speaking styles as blunt and uncaring; men view women's as indirect and obscure. ~ James W. Pennebaker

I understand what it's like to come with your family, and to uproot yourself and come to another culture. You need a lot of support. People say, 'She's got her daughter; she's got her husband.' Yeah, but she hasn't got anyone else. ~ Emma Thompson

Living in another culture, not just visiting it, has reshaped our view of the world. ~ Nancy Petralia

Who is the best rapper ever? I'll probably have to say Eminem. I would definitely say Eminem. He came from a whole another culture, literally. Mastered it, outsold everybody and he did every kind of record imaginable. He could take any topic and make a song out of it. I haven't seen any artist do that yet. ~ Akon

When we don't have God's Word in our heart language, a translator says, "It looks like God is coming every Sunday to visit dressed in another culture and language. As soon as He goes away, the rest of the week we have no God. God is a visitor. ~ Patrick Cogdill

My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Imagine a society's discovering a vaccine against a deadly disease that has been ravaging its people and continues to ravage people in neighboring societies, where the cause of the disease is incorrectly attributed to improper diet. What would be the judgment on such a society if it withheld its vaccine on the grounds that it would be ethnocentric to try to instruct members of another culture that their medical ideas are incorrect, and to induce them to adopt the effective treatment? If one accepts that one has the good fortune to be in possession of the true religion and thereby has access to the most valuable possible rewards, is one not similarly obligated to spread this blessing to those less fortunate? ~ Rodney Stark

It is worthwhile studying other peoples, because every understanding of another culture is an experiment with our own. ~ Roy Wagner

I was immediately smitten with an attraction to this culture, not in the sense of high culture but of the basic way people behaved towards one another. ~ Harry Mathews

He didn't finish most of the stories he started anymore, couldn't bear to. He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared the part of him being numbed was his soul. ~ Joe Hill

I like that feeling when you're making art, that you're taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility. ~ Kiki Smith

As wars dwindled to skirmishes and our strength grew, so David was able to spend less time with military commanders and more with the engineers and overseers who were fanning out throughout the land, digging cisterns, making roads, fortifying, connecting, and generally making a nation out of our scattered people. ~ Geraldine Brooks

He who walks out of step hears another drum. ~ Ken Kesey

Yet it would be nearly impossible to overstate Lyell's influence. The Principles of Geology went through twelve editions in his lifetime and contained notions that shaped geological thinking far into the twentieth century. Darwin took a first edition with him on the Beagle voyage and wrote afterwards that 'the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one's mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes22.' In short, he thought him nearly a god, as did many of his generation. It is a testament to the strength of Lyell's sway that in the 1980s, when geologists had to abandon just a part of his theory to accommodate the impact theory of extinctions, it nearly killed them. But that is another chapter. ~ Bill Bryson

To our own sorrows serious heed we give, But for another?s we soon cease to grieve. ~ Pindar

I wish I had an extra day with my mom sometimes. Or another hour in the day with my family, husband and children. ~ Mary J. Blige

On the Internet, it's survival of the easiest ... Give users a good experience and they're apt to turn into frequent and loyal customers. But ... it's easy to turn to another supplier in the face of even a minor hiccup. Only if a site is extremely easy to use will anybody bother staying around. ~ Jakob Nielsen

Walking in the Light 5 l This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that m God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 6 n If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and o do not practice the truth. 7But p if we walk in the light, q as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and r the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. 8 s If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and t the truth is not in us. 9 u If we confess our sins, he is v faithful and just to forgive us our sins and r to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10If we say we have not sinned, w we make him a liar, and x his word is not in us. ~ Anonymous

Comedians and people in general have a cultural right to talk about their own culture and race. ~ Margaret Cho

Another side to me is this very sexual being. When I look back on my life, it's always been there. It's been there since I was 10 years old, having the imagination that I had. ~ Janet Jackson

Even though the god in all these religions is basically the same, each regards the way chosen by the others as reprehensible, and to top it all, religionists actually PRAY for one another! They have scorn for their brothers of the right-hand path because their religions carry different labels, and somehow this animosity must be released. What better way than through "prayer"! What a simperingly polite way of saying: "I hate your gusts," is the thinly disguised device known as praying for your enemy! Praying for one's own enemy is nothing more than bargain-basement anger, and of a decidedly shoddy and inferior quality! ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean. ~ George Santayana

I do a squat to demonstrate. Generally I do squats with weight – lots of it – but since the most physical exercise Chloe seems accustomed to is running her mouth. I figure I'd better start at the beginning. The very beginning.
"Okay?" I say, doing another since she didn't mimic my motion the second time.
She watches my movement in the mirror. "One more time," she says.
I comply, and then mutter a string of curses because Chloe Bellamy has just reached out in the middle of a busy gym and patted my ass.
"Very nice," she says, sounding surprised.
"Chloe!"
She shrugs. "You just got so upset when I was ogling that other guy instead of you, so I wanted to make you feel good. ~ Lauren Layne

Because never had I hated another human being more than I hated Paratore in that moment. ~ Lisa Tawn Bergren

Edward looks wistfully at Mat, and while the girls are pretty, Nancy particularly, it is Mat who thinks about the most, because he wished he'd been more like Mat when he was young.
If he'd been more like Mat, more confident, maybe he wouldn't have missed his chances in life, chances that sometimes only came along once. Sometimes there are single moments, he thinks, where your path divides, your life can go one way, so very different from another. Work out well, rather than be a failure. And if you miss those chances, he thinks, well, is that it? ~ Marcus Sedgwick

Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew. ~ Lionel Blue

Most people don't realize this, but every taste is related to a memory or an emotion. Flavors are part of a person's past, and are the translation of emotion into another language. ~ Saygın Ersin

when someone deliberately took a step to help you preserve face, it was meaningful. If you repaid them in kind, then you began to see each other as allies, friends, and family. Mianzi or lian - face - was intricately, inextricably intertwined with these nuanced social interconnections. ~ M.H. Boroson

One man's idea of perfect order is another man's chaos. ~ Dean Koontz

Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist. ~ Haruki Murakami

Apollo without Dionysus may indeed be a well-informed, good citizen but he's a dull fellow. He may even be 'cultured,' in the sense one often gets from traditionalist writings in education ... But without Dionysus he will never make and remake a culture. ~ Jerome Bruner

My name's Todd but I changed it in the first grade because there was another kid named Todd and I didn't understand that that was possible. ~ T. J. Miller

You know, the media and politicians are always gonna be in a bit of tension with one another and probably most of the time that's healthy and indeed even creative. But it's where - it's really when news organisations are used as kind of instruments of politics that it gets tricky. ~ Tony Blair

Once you leave Sundance suddenly you run into bulldozers and concrete and cranes, and all that heritage that the Mormon culture used to be so proud of is turned into out of control develpoment. ~ Robert Redford

The Roman Christian mythology (and theology) discourages the vice of licentiousness, and so this is better than the heathen, but it encourages bigotry, hypocrisy, cant, and many another vice which the older Mother of Abominations kept clear from. ~ Theodore Parker

All my reading and studying of them has taught me that law is one thing and right is another thing. Ask any lawyer. You go to Sunday-school to learn what ~ Jack London

The reason which cause to hate someone will never be a valid reason, so think twice and thrice on that reason before you start hating anyone. ~ Rashid Jorvee

He gave an evil smile. "Let's just say that if I ever let anyone into my life again, not only will it kill me, but they'll never take another breath for all eternity. How's that explanation for ya'?"
I smiled. "Much better, thank you. ~ Ellie A. Gray

Culture makes lies plausible through exposure to time. It makes prejudice seem like physics intergenerationally. It is therefore the most dangerous opponent of philosophy, because it feels the most credible to the average person. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Man has regarded woman as his tool. She has learnt to be his tool and in the end found it is easy and pleasurable to be such, because when one drags another in his fall, the descent is easy. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The truth is that the new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy with nothing to back it up.

Or, as Susan Brownmiller put it when I asked her what she made of all this, "You think you're being brave, you think you're being sexy, you think you're transcending feminism. But that's bullshit. ~ Ariel Levy

If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end. ~ Peter Singer

I've got another friend who is half-German and half-Polish. He hates Jews but can't remember why! ~ Jackie Mason

Well, that was the clerk class for you. They might be completely without culture, but they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable. ~ Sarah Waters

What happened?"
Bria shrugged. "I waited until I was sure there was no one else around who could get hurt, then threw my coffee in the bastard's face and took away his gun. While he was screaming from the pain and the second-degree burns, I cuffed his ass and hauled him down to the station. End of story."
Fin gave my sister a warm, admiring look. "Nice takedown, detective. Even if you should have found another way to do it. Don't you know that you never, ever waste a cup of coffee like that? ~ Jennifer Estep

That a Jew is despised or persecuted is bad for him, of course-but far worse for the Christian who does it-for although persecuted he can remain a good Jew-whereas no Christian who persecutes can possibly remain-if he ever was one-a good Christian. ~ Phyllis Bottome

And so every one of us in the FBI, I don't care if it's a file clerk someplace or an agent there or a computer specialist, understands that our main mission is to protect the public from another September 11, another terrorist attack. ~ Robert Mueller

It is one thing to desire, another to be in capacity fit for what we desire. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Love endows us with a sort of personal religion; we respect another live within ourselves. ~ Honore De Balzac

I don't think I'm entirely on board with the 'do what you truly want to do' school of thought. Not without a little more nuance. There has to be an anchor in the wide-open space. Otherwise, 'doing what you truly want' isn't an authentic attempt at exploration -- it's just another hyper-individualistic credo masquerading as something grand. I mean we're all gung ho about pursuing personal freedom, but why do we want it? If we never constructively apply it to something beyond ourselves, and if it doesn't deepen our sense of connection and humanity, then what's the point? ~ Clara Bensen

They were coarse and crude. They made rude finger gestures to one another and they were their scars like badges. They were a family, unbreakable, loyal and absolutely powerful when they stood together. ~ Christine Feehan

Most people's lives are cluttered up with things: material things, things to do, things to think about. Their lives are like the history of humanity, which Winston Churchill defined as "one damn thing after another." Their minds are filled up with the clutter of thoughts, one thought after another. ~ Eckhart Tolle

George stared at the dove. What would she say if she could speak to him? What would she wish for, for her father? For she, too, had been harmed by a man who had meant to show his utmost love for her.
It made George wonder why love was suppose to be such a wonderful thing. As far as he could tell, love was just another excuse for causing pain. ~ Mette Ivie Harrison

Doubts never end. If one doubt is removed, another takes its place. It is like removing the leaves of a tree one by one. Even if all the leaves are clipped off, new ones grow. The tree itself must be uprooted. ~ Ramana Maharshi

Our big mistake in modern intellectualism is first and foremost its lack of nuance. We have made science synonymous with atheism - a presupposed conception and yet, another means to non sequiturs - and therefore, to a number of enthusiasts determined to go the further, anti-theism. Hereby let us observe that science has long served best and should be, if none other, the one discipline, if at all possible, free of potential ideology, pro-religious or anti-religious, and/or biased presupposition in order to maintain the true authenticity and the full reliability of its nature. ~ Criss Jami

Ali ... we should have gone to see that movie. Malcolm X was another one. ~ Cicely Tyson

Plus, you're the last Dragomir. You're always going to be in the spotlight. Who's she? Just another Ivashkov. There are tons of them.'
'Probably because all the guys like Adrian and have all sorts of illegitimate children.'
'Adrian doesn't have any children.'
'That we know of,' I said mysteriously. ~ Richelle Mead