1
A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.Clifford Geertz
2
Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.Clifford Geertz
3
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.Clifford Geertz
4
It may be in the cultural particularities of people – in their oddities – that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.Clifford Geertz
5
Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity... It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.Clifford Geertz
6
What we had actually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.Clifford Geertz
7
The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.Clifford Geertz