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.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

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.

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.

What we had actually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.