Levi Strauss Quotes

These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

There exists [a] word in German, Geschichte, which designates not accomplished history, but history in the present, doubtless determined in large part, yet only in part, by the already accomplished past; for a history which is present, which is living, is also open to a future that is uncertain, unforeseeable, not yet accomplished, and therefore aleatory. Living history obeys only a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle. Marx did not use the term 'constant', which I have taken from Levi-Strauss, but an expression of genius: 'tendential law', capable of inflecting (but not contradicting) the primary tendential law, which means that a tendency does not possess the form or figure of linear law, but that it can bifurcate under the impact of an encounter with another tendency, and so on ad infinitum. At each intersection the tendency can take a path that is unforeseeable because it is aleatory. ~ Louis Althusser

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

An expert knows all the answers - if you ask the right questions. ~ Levi-Strauss

I can't help thinking that science would be more appealing if it had no practical use. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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 ... ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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 ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Photography is light-writing, the language of images. Less abstract than written or spoken language, it selects images from the existing world of appearances and arranges them in patterns. The camera-eye doesn't think, it recognizes. It shows us what we already know, but don't know that we know. ~ David Levi Strauss

Animals are good to think with. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are 'good to eat' but because they are 'good to think.' ~ Levi-Strauss

In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth. ~ Levi-Strauss

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

My favorite designers are Levi Strauss and Fruit of the Loom. ~ Robin Wright

In Colma, a suburb of San Francisco, California there's a proposal pending to tax ... the dead. If proponents get their way, grave sites will be taxed $5 dollars - per grave, per year - for eternity. In Colma the dead outnumber the living by a ratio of roughly 1000-to-1, including such notables as: Wyatt Earp, Levi Strauss, and William Randolph Hearst. And they, apparently, haven't paid their fair share. For liberals, when it comes to taxes ... nothing is sacred. ~ Rush Limbaugh

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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

I am the place in which something has occurred. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings. ~ Levi-Strauss

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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

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

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

•"To us today, it is tempting to ask why societies with early writing systems accepted the ambiguities that restricted writing to a few functions and a few scribes. But even to pose that question is illustrate the gap between ancient perspectives and our own expectations of mass literacy. The intended restricted uses of early writing provided a positive disincentive for devising less ambiguous writing systems. The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to recorded numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, ancients writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings." Personal uses of writing by nonprofessionals came only much later, as writing systems grew simpler and more expressive ~ Jared Diamond

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

[ 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 ... ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Boiled food is life,' Levi-Strauss writes, 'roast food death.' He reports finding countless examples in the world's folklore of 'cauldrons of immortality,' but not a single example of a 'spit of immortality. ~ Michael Pollan

The wise man is not he who gives the right answers; he is the one who asks the right questions. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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

The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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

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

During the Gold Rush, most would-be miners lost money, but people who sold them picks, shovels, tents and blue-jeans (Levi Strauss) made a nice profit. ~ Peter Lynch

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

I'm thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss - a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more. ~ Chris Kraus

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

Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

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. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

The only scholarship that has any merit, I suppose, is what is useful to other people as well as oneself. The most meritorious of all is what is useful to other scholars, sometimes for generations. ~ Peter Levi

Well, I think the first piece of music I ever heard that I really loved was 'Salome's Dances' by Richard Strauss. I played that 12-inch, 78 record, and I stood up on an ottoman to play it on a big Victrola and I'd just keep playing it and playing it. ~ Mike Stoller

The body does whatever it wants. I am not my body; I am my mind. ~ Rita Levi-Montalcini

When we talk about change, we, the business leaders, have to implement it. We have to look at what we're not doing and what we should be doing. ~ Ofra Strauss

Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end, as T.S. Eliot somewhere says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freedom from the past, or from the future.
But we keep making our way, as we have to. We're all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that's the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we're riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain. ~ Darin Strauss

I just remember that when Jennifer Love Hewitt released an album a few years back, it was like 'Oh, why is Jennifer Love Hewitt releasing an album?' But if Queen Latifah, or Justin Timberlake, or anybody else wants to be an actor, it's like 'Yeah, I'll go check that out.' ~ Zachary Levi

He had kissed me. Put his demon tongue in my mouth. I had kissed him back. Yet I had a boyfriend. Adam. Who I believe I've mentioned. More than once.
Boyfriend named Adam, demon named Levi kissing me - that pretty much meant I had cheated on my boyfriend, didn't it?
Didn't mean to do that. Yikes.
I bit my fingernails and knocked on Brandon's door and tried to rationalize my way around it. It hadn't been a premeditated kiss. It hadn't been initiated by me. Did that really make it cheating? Or just a sort of accidental meeting of the mouths?
Shouldn't there be like a five-second rule, anyway? Like dropping food on the floor.
If you retrieve it immediately, you can still eat it. If the kiss lasted less than say, a minute, it didn't count. Right? ~ Erin Lynn

As far as comic books are concerned, I was always a Marvel guy for the most part, although I did follow DC a little. I don't know, honestly I'd just like to play whatever role [that] not just the studio, but the fans think I fit the best into. Because I think, especially in worlds like that, you've really got to do right by the fan base and stay in tune with what they are looking for and what they desire. I would just want to do right by them. ~ Zachary Levi

Ergometer is Greek for 'work meter' ~ Barry S. Strauss

...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong. ~ Peter Watson

All of your emotions are going to try to fuck you up. They are there to try to confuse you, so know right now that they cannot be trusted at all. You will feel shy sometimes, and self-conscious, and you must deal with it like you deal with a pebble in your shoe. It's uncomfortable, but you ignore it. It's not part of the equation. ~ Neil Strauss

One of the treasures of nature is beauty; this, too, should be preserved. ~ Yehuda Levi

This room was worse than she thought.
Dark. Remote. Practically in the trees. Practically Enchanted.
A calculus test would feel intimate in here. ~ Rainbow Rowell

Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful. ~ Leo Strauss

A healthy relationship is when two individuated adults decide to have a relationship and that becomes a third entity. They nurture the relationship and the relationship nurtures them. But they're not overly dependent or independent: They are interdependent, which means that they take care of the majority of their needs and wants on their own, but when they can't, they're not afraid to ask their partner for help." She pauses to let it all sink in, then concludes, "Only when our love for someone exceeds our need for them do we have a shot at a genuine relationship together. ~ Neil Strauss

The designation of the locality in one excludes the appearances narrated by the rest; the determination of time in another leaves no space for the narratives of his fellow-evangelists; the enumeration of a third is given without any regard to the events reported by his predecessors; lastly, among several appearances recounted by various narrators, each claims to be the last, and yet has nothing in common with the others. Hence nothing but wilful blindness can prevent the perception that no one of the narrators knew and presupposed what another records. ~ David Friedrich Strauss

If I had not been discriminated against or had not suffered persecution, I would never have received the Nobel Prize. ~ Rita Levi-Montalcini

He asked her what she was famous for - "everybody's famous for something ~ Neil Strauss

[Biographical info on Rita]
Born and raised in a Sephardic Jewish family in which culture and love of learning were categorical imperatives, she abandoned religion and embraced atheism. She devoted herself to Science, getting to the point of renouncing marriage for scientific research.
... Unlike other people, Rita Levi Montalcini was a complete human being. ~ Rita Levi-Montalcini

I've had menial jobs, and 'professional writer' isn't one of them. ~ Darin Strauss

He spread out in his chair like a melting shard of Swiss cheese and informed us: "The only lies I'll ever tell are: 'I won't come in your mouth' and 'I'll just rub it around your ass.'" It wasn't a pretty visual. ~ Neil Strauss

You will speed up your growth by being selfish. So imagine that the people you're looking at can actually take care of themselves. And if you ask for what you want and trust that the other person will say yes or no powerfully, it will make things very interesting. ~ Neil Strauss

The business case for diverse employment is not a matter we can ignore. When the business case merges with values and national objectives, this serves as a wake up call for us all. We cannot ignore the opportunity; we cannot ignore the commitment. ~ Ofra Strauss

If you wanted a peek at my dick I would have sent pictures," Levi growled. ~ Katie Reus

The sea's only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head ... ~ Primo Levi

My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing. ~ Darin Strauss

In our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What ~ Primo Levi

When my eye rested on an arid height, spirit partook of the barrenness. - Heartily wish Niebuhr & Strauss to the dogs. The deuce take their penetration & acumen. They have robbed us of the bloom. ~ Herman Melville

Robert Strauss, the former Democratic chairman who died last year, once said every politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself. ~ Anonymous

On the crowded subway car back to Brooklyn afterwards, the youngest of my three female companions had her bottom groped by a man about Strauss-Kahn's age. At first, she thought he had simply bumped into her. That was before she felt her buttock being cupped and said something to me, as young women often do, tentatively, quietly, as though it were perhaps not happening or perhaps not quite a problem.

Finally, she glared at him and told him to stop. I was reminded of a moment when I was an impoverished seventeen-year-old living in Paris and some geezer grabbed my ass. It was perhaps my most American moment in France, then the land of a thousand disdainful gropers; American because I was carrying three grapefruits, a precious purchase from my small collection of funds, and I threw those grapefruits, one after another, like baseballs at the creep and had the satisfaction of watching him scuttle into the night.

His action, like so much sexual violence against women, was undoubtedly meant to be a reminder that this world was not mine, that my rights -- my liberté, egalité, sororité, if you will -- didn't matter. Except that I had sent him running in a barrage of fruit. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Juries must, of necessity, be governed, in reaching many results through inferences from other facts, by certain laws of nature and human reason. They are often obliged to infer one thing from another, and this, whether that other be a fact direct or circumstantial. ~ Levi Woodbury