Eugene Delacroix Quotes

The biblical authors wrote of God's sovereignty over His world, and of man's experiences within that world, using such modes of speech about the natural order and human experience as were current in their days, and in a language that was common to themselves and their contemporaries. This is saying no more than that they wrote to be understood. Their picture of the world and things in it is not put forward as normative for later science, andy more than their use of Hebrew and Greek is put forward as a perfect model for composition in these languages.

You can only judge anything that happened in the times, in the times that that happened.

Songs sometimes are so connected to the sociology of the time.

We must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional, and the spiritual. We must make clear in what respects our epoch differs from others and in what respects it is similar.

'The White Ribbon' had to be in German because of the subject matter, that was clear. But in the case of 'Amour,' it could have taken place in any country.

Just as we acquaint ourselves with materials, and just as we must understand functions, we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of the day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise, for we are dependent on the spirit of our time.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.

We shall not understand the history of men and other times unless we ourselves are alive to the requirements which that history satisfied.

It is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present.

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.

The spirit of the times can haunt even the atheists.

I don't think that you can rehash music that was born in the Fillmore East and came from a whole different set of social and emotional circumstances. The situation has changed. Let's get real about this.

language is never neutral

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are.

I soon found I could not talk about that in a vacuum without understanding the historical, cultural, political context, and giving it some legacy and some roots, and so then it just started to have tentacles that just spread out in all these places, and already a vicious project became pretty overwhelming in scope, and so it was a lot of diligent, day-to-day fighting with the footage, trying to get it down to a place where it was manageable and emotional.

Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information.

In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion.