30 quotes
One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.
Mythologiques I: Le cru et le cuit (1964)
The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.
The Raw and the Cooked : Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1975)
The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when we have separated them from this dross.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Nature has only a limited number of procedures at her disposal and that the kinds of procedure which Nature uses at one level of reality are bound to reappear at different levels.
Myth and Meaning (1978)
The idea behind structuralism is that there are things we may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other.
Humanity is confined to the borders of the tribe, the linguistic group, or even, in some instances, to the village ....
Race and History (1952)
Marxist, communist and totalitarian ideology is only a ruse of history.
The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
I hate travelling and explorers.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Men can coexist on condition that they recognize each other as being all equally, though differently, human, but they can also coexist by denying each other a comparable degree of humanity, and thus establishing a system of subordination.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Once men begin to feel cramped in their geographical, social and mental habitat, they are in danger of being tempted by the simple solution of denying one section of the species the right to be considered as human. This allows the rest a little elbow-room for a few more decades.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize — because they set so little store by them — the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Adventure has no place in the anthropologists profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months
We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are "good to eat" but because they are "good to think." [Les espèces sont choisies non commes bonnes à manger, mais comme bonnes à penser.]
Totemism (1962)