Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

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 skilful than our own.

Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

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.

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.

Le savant n'est pas l'homme qui fournit les vraies réponses; c'est celui qui pose les vraies questions.

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.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.