Quotes by Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict

. . . work even when I’m satisfied with it is never my child I love nor my servant I’ve brought to heel. It’s always busy work I do with my left hand, and part of me watches grudging the wastes of a lifetime.

Children

Hands

Left Hand

… it is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to strive except for one’s own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations.

Lonely

Peace

War

… oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love–not this efficient, philanthropic self.

Long

Self

Writing

… with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding of that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger–and it would be fatal to world peace–is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.

Country

Fall

Ignorance

A man’s indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.

Gratitude

Jobs

Men

An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.

Culture

Example

Generations

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

Art

Motivation

Religious

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex

Complexes

Culture

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.

Culture

Enlightenment

Needs

Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.

Spiritual

Storm

Sunshine

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Aging

Analysis

Anglo Saxon

Answers

Arrogance

Art

Attitude

Baby

Bears

Believe

Body

Book

Brave

Brotherhood

Careers

Children

Civilization

Community

Complexes

Constitution

Country

Culture

Decision

Degrees

Desperation

Details

Differences

Different

Diversity

Earth

Educational

Emotional

Enlightenment

Entity

Events

Evil

Examination

Example

Excitement

Expression

Eye

Faces

Faith

Fall

Feels

Fighting

Firsts

Freedom

Future

Gamer

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The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

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Quotes by Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict

. . . work even when I’m satisfied with it is never my child I love nor my servant I’ve brought to heel. It’s always busy work I do with my left hand, and part of me watches grudging the wastes of a lifetime.

… oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love–not this efficient, philanthropic self.

A man’s indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.

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

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex

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.

Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.

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