I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries.
A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.
You have to learn the language of Hamlet.
Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.
People don't realize how black people, minorities, women as well, all their lives, they have had to make the effort to understand everybody else. All my life, I've known American culture very well. I probably know American literature more than the average American.
They pointed out that the friendship between the two artists had always been a byword or whatever you called it. A well-read Egg summed it up by saying that they were like Thingummy and what's-his-name.
Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.
And though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek.
Sometimes, going to see one opera is hard because you don't know the genre. Good opera is like good wine. There are so many varieties, and it helps to inform you about what you like when you see a lot.
I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.
I'm surprised by how many people have not seen 'Footloose.'
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.
Given the unprecedented ignorance of the Bible in contemporary America, it is likely that more young Americans will only know the Noah of 'Noah.' We can only hope that the film offers even a fraction of the wisdom of the original.
The world does not look to us in the Arab world out of a healthy desire for knowledge.
I have a pretty good knowledge of the Indian world by virtue of living on several different reservations and being exposed to several different cultures and languages.
As a matter of fact, I've been to Italy many times before I met my husband, which he can't even imagine that I could possibly know anything about Italian food. But, you know, Italian food's really basic, and there's so many different variations on it that what my husband did is he broke it down for me.
There's inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references - history, language, culture, all this stuff - but to be well-versed in Western references as well.
I'm turned on by guys who are cultured. That'll keep me intrigued. They don't have to have a single degree, but they should speak other languages or know things about other parts of the world or history or certain artists or musicians. I like to be taught. I like to sit on that side of the table.
DJs and people in the street know what they like.
The more I know about America, the better I'll be at performing American characters and American stories.
Everyone who raps isn't hip-hop. To be hip-hop, you've got to know the culture. You got to know the history.
Art is a luxury. It's not necessary for you to - you can work your job and you can make some money and never know who Walt Whitman was, and never read a poem.
Nobody in America, in the modern generation, has read their mythology or legends.
Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions--these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term "experience.
Surely knowledge of the natural world, knowledge of the human condition, knowledge of the nature and dynamics of society, knowledge of the past so that one may use it in experiencing the present and aspiring to the future--all of these, it would seem reasonable to suppose, are essential to an educated man. To these must be added another--knowledge of the products of our artistic heritage that mark the history of our esthetic wonder and delight.
