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.

We don't know what we think until we see what we say.

As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

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.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.