culture

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.

Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture.

Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.

Many men absorbed in business show such a rare quality of culture that we are surprised at it. The reason invariably is partly because hard work and even the weariness it leaves carry a nobility with them, but also because there is no room in such lives for inferior mental occupation.

If there is one word which characterizes our world in this exciting last half of the twentieth century, the word is change. Change in political life - change in economic life - change is social life - change in personal life. Change is the hallmark of our times. It's not gradual, comfortable change. It is sudden, rapid, often violent. It touches and often disrupts whole cultures and hundreds of millions of people. Behind it all lies an explosive growth in scientific knowledge and accomplishment. Some 90 per cent of all the scientists who ever lived are living today and the total accumulation of scientific knowledge is doubling every ten years. But this is reality. If we remember that, then we will never flinch at change. We will adjust to it, welcome it, meet it as a friend and know it as God's will.

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations - past and present - are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia.