Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

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

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

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

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.

Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.

I am the place in which something has occurred.

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

Animals are good to think with.

Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.

Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.

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.

No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.

With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.

Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.

There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing

All the essentials of humanity's artistic treasures can be found in New York.

I hate travelling and explorers

How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time.

I can't help thinking that science would be more appealing if it had no practical use.

[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.

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.

These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.

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.