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.

[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

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.

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything