World Culture Quotes

“It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal shape is concerned, it will be equally mythical in either case. But we notice that any emphasis on shape or structure or pattern or form always throws a verbal narrative in the direction we call mythical rather than historical.(p.21)”
― Northrop Frye, Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture

“The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]”
― Northrop Frye, Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture

“There is nothing wrong in development, it is wrong when development happens at the cost of environment and at the cost of culture and humanity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Girl Over God: The Novel

“Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.”
― William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

“The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers.”
― Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

“In the 1950s, America had picked up the globe by the heels and shaken the change from its pockets. Europe had become a poor cousin -- all crests and no table settings. And the indistinguishable countries of Africa, Asia, and South America had just begun skittering across our schoolroom walls like salamanders in the sun. True, the Communists were out there, somewhere, but with Joe McCarthy in the grave and no one on the Moon, for the time being the Russians just skulked across the pages of spy novels.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Culture should be a path, not a prison.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sleepless for Society

“The most bizarre things in the universe isn't weird meteorites, odd comets or strange black holes! The most bizarre things in the universe is the traditions, beliefs and cultures of this world!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Your Culture is My Culture (The Sonnet)

With infinite love brimming in my heart,
I have arrived at your doorstep.
Please, I beg you, do not turn me back,
Let me in, so I may be one with your footstep.
It's not my fault, I wasn't born in your culture,
Yet I've assimilated your culture as my own.
Please do not throw me out my dear friend,
Standing together our powers will be honed.
I may not speak your native tongue,
I may not be familiar with your way of life.
But do you not smile like me when in joy,
Like me do you not shed tears when in strife!
Here I stand at your door with my arms stretched.
Hold it with affection or chop it off if you so elect.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live