Ruth Benedict > Quotes

“The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.”
― Ruth Benedict

“The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so many answers”
― Ruth Fulton Benedict

“I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.”
― Ruth Benedict

“No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.”
― Ruth Benedict

“The trouble with life
isn't that there is no answer,
but that there are so many answers”
― Ruth Benedict

“There are two kinds of opportunities: one which we chance upon, the other which we create.”
― Ruth Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination.”
― Ruth Benedict

“I have always used the world of make-believe with a certain desperation.”
― Ruth Benedict

“The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accomodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior.”
― Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

“A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. [...] Each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogenous items of behaviour take more and more congruous shape. [...]

Such patterning of culture cannot be ignored as if it were an unimportant detail. The whole, as modern science is insisting in many fields, is not merely the sum of all its parts, but the result of a unique arrangement and interrelation of the parts that has brought about a new entity. Gunpowder is not merely the sum of sulphur and charcoal and saltpeter, and no amount of knowledge even of all three of tis elements in all the forms they take in the natural world will demonstrate the nature of gunpowder.”
― Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

“We do not see the lens through which we look.”
― Ruth Benedict

“Japan likewise put her hopes of victory on a different basis from that prevalent in the United States. (...) Even when she was winning, her civilian statesmen, her High Command, and her soldiers repeated that this was no contest between armaments; it was pitting of our faith in things against their faith in spirit.”
― Ruth Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behaviour is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture.”
― Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

“Such men will never know the added love of their culture which comes from a knowledge of other ways of life.”
― Ruth Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“The hero we sympathize with because he is in love or cherishes some personal ambition, they condemn as weak because he has allowed these feelings to come between him and his gimu or his giri.”
― Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.”
― Ruth Fulton Benedict

“the Japanese love the theme. They play up suicide as Americans play up crime and they have the same vicarious enjoyment of it. They choose to dwell on events of self-destruction instead of on destruction of others.”
― Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so many answers.”
― Ruth Benedict

“[T]he institution that human cultures build up upon the hints presented by the environment or by man's physical necessities do not keep as close to the original impulse as we easily imagine. These hints are, in reality, mere rough sketches, a list of bare facts. [...] Warfare is not the expression of the instinct of pugnacity. Man's pugnacity is so small a hint in the human equipment that it may not be given any expression in inter-tribal relation. [...] Pugnacity is no more than the touch to the ball of custom, a touch also that may be withheld.”
― Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

“For in Japan the constant goal is honor. It is necessary to command respect. The means one uses to that end are tools one takes up and then lays aside as circumstances dictate.”
― Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“The heavier our bodies, the higher our will, our spirit, rises above them.' 'The wearier we are, the more splendid the training.”
― Ruth Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“At all events, there can be no reasonable doubt that one of the most effective ways in which to deal with the staggering burden of psychopathic tragedies in America at the present time is by means of an educational program which fosters tolerance in society and a kind of self-respect and independence…”
― Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

“A moral code was good for the Chinese whose inferior natures required such artificial means of restraint.”
― Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“Shame cultures therefore do not provide for confessions, even to the gods. They have ceremonies for good luck rather than for expiation.”
― Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“It would be truer to say that the citizens’ self-respect, in the two countries, is tied up with different attitudes; in our country it depends on his management of his own affairs and in Japan it depends on repaying what he owes to accredited benefactors.”
― Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“Americans gear all their living to a constantly challenging world and are prepared to accept the challenge. Japanese reassurances are based rather on a way of life that is planned and charted beforehand and where the greatest threat comes from the unforeseen.

The Japanese, more than any other sovereign nation, have been conditioned to a world where the smallest details of conduct are mapped and status is assigned. During two centuries where law and order were maintained in such a world with an iron hand, the Japanese learned to identify this meticulously plotted hierarchy with safety and security. So long as they stayed within known boundaries and so long as they fulfilled known obligations, they could trust their world.

The Japanese point of view is that obeying the law is repayment upon their highest indebtedness.

In spite of the fact that Japan is one of the great Buddhist nations in the world, her ethics at this point contrast sharply with the teachings of Gautama Buddha and of the holy books of Buddhism. The Japanese do not condemn self-gratification. They are not Puritans. They consider physical pleasures good and worthy of cultivation.

Buddhist teachers and modern nationalistic leaders have written and spoken on this theme: human nature in Japan is naturally good and to be trusted. It does not need to flight and evil half of itself. It needs to cleanse the windows of its soul and act with appropriateness on every different occasion.

The Japanese define the supreme task of life as fulfilling one's obligations. They fully accept the fact that repaying "on" means sacrificing one's personal desires and pleasures. The idea that the pursuit of happiness is a serious goal of life is to them an amazing and immoral doctrine. Happiness is a relaxation in which one indulges when one can.

Zen seeks only the light man can find in himself.

if you do this, if you do that, the adults say to the children, the word will laugh at you. The rules are particularistic and situational and a great many of them concern what we should call etiquette. They require subordinating one's own will to the ever-increasing duties to neighbors, to family and country. The child must restrain himself, he must recognize his indebtedness.

Training is explicit for every art and skill. It is the habit that is taught, not just the rules. Adults do not consider that children will "pick up" the proper habits when the time to employ them comes around.

Great things can only be achieved through self-restraint.

Japanese people often keep their thoughts busy with trivial minutiae in order to stave off awareness of their real feelings. They are mechanical in the performance of a disciplined routine which is fundamentally meaningless to them.

Japan's real strength which she can use in remaking herself into a peaceful nation lies in her ability to say to a course of action: "that failed" and then to throw her energies into other channels. The Japanese have an ethic of alternatives.”
― Ruth Benedict, THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD: PATTERNS OF JAPANESE CULTURE

“The typical Japanese swing of mood is from intense dedication to intense boredom,”
― Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“The Japanese, she argues, are unusually sensitive to the opinion of others. Shame comes from not living up to social obligations. You can feel guilty about a crime that goes unnoticed. Shame depends on the observation of others.”
― Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“One can hardly find elsewhere than in Japan techniques of mysticism pursued without the reward of the consummating mystic experience and appropriated by warriors to train them for hand-to-hand combat.”
― Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

“You owed him absolute obedience because you were Japanese.”
― Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture