68 Quotes by Ruth Benedict

Culture, with its processes and functions, is a subject upon which we need all the enlightenment we can achieve, and there is no direction in which we can seek with greater reward than in the facts of pre-literate societies.

In a world that holds books and babies and canyon trails, why should one condemn oneself to live day-in, day-out with people one does not like, and sell oneself to chaperone and correct them?

We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.

In a day of footloose movements of people and of mixed marriages in the ancestry of the most desirable elements of the community we preach unabashed the gospel of the pure race.

Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behavior.

As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

The heavier our bodies, the higher our will, our spirit, rises above them.' 'The wearier we are, the more splendid the training.

Virtue begins when we dedicate ourselves actively to the job of gratitude.

Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.