The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

Play: It is an an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility. The play-mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm, and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion. A feeling of exaltation and tension accompanies the action.

The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.

In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.

Every work of history constructs contexts and designs, forms in which past reality can be comprehended. History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

Culture requires in the first place a certain balance of material and spiritual values.

The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.