Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.

For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society.

Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.

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. . . .

The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.

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.