Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes about Past

Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the

Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Fashion, Past, Knowing Nothing

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Past, Race, Ideas

"Tristes Tropiques". Book by Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chapter 38: "A Little Glass of Rum," pp. 393, 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. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Past, Reality, Years

Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.49, Penguin

Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes about Past

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