Clifford Geertz Quotes

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Diamonds are intrinsically worthless, except for the deep psychological need they fill.

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.

'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.

The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.

The meaning lies in the appropriation.

Believing that navel-gazing in and of itself can transform itself into something that means something for society. I mean, we are communicative creatures. We desire to sort of understand each other's experiences and points of view. Storytelling is what painting, literature, filmmaking is all about.

Aja gave Loor an up and down once-over. She then said, "Is Loor a man's name or a woman's name?" Ouch. Loor answered, "It is the name of a legendary hero on Zadaa. A woman." Really?" Aja said. "What did she do that was so heroic?" She killed her enemies and ate them.

No one can take culture seriously if he believes that it is only the uppermost of several layers of epiphenomena resting on a primary reality of economic activity.

I believe that the arts make indispensable contributions to our understanding.

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

Things have no power that humans don't put there.

My aim is to say that the machinery of the heavens is not like a divine animal but like a clock (and anyone who believes a clock has a soul gives the work the honour due to its maker) and that in it almost all the variety of motions is from one very simple magnetic force acting on bodies, as in the clock all motions are from a very simple weight.

It's no accident that Cinderella has been in the culture for thousands of years, and in cross cultures. I've traveled a bit recently, and in Russia, they completely believe they own this tale. And in Italy, they feel it absolutely is part of who they are. There is a timeless web to it.

Soul is a constant. It's cultural. It's always going to be there, in different flavors and degrees.

It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator. The people down here just ate that up!

To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.

The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason-not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creators's design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random.

I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.