Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.
More Quotes from Claude Levi Strauss:
Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.Claude Levi Strauss
If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. . . .
Claude Levi Strauss
The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. . . .
Claude Levi Strauss
The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space.
Claude Levi Strauss
The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.
Claude Levi Strauss
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
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Based on Topics: God Quotes, Language Quotes, Man Quotes, Mankind Quotes, Music Quotes, Mystery Quotes, People Quotes, Progress Quotes, Science QuotesBased on Keywords: formulating, untranslatable
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