Andrew Delbanco Famous Quotes & Sayings

The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence. — Andrew Delbanco

So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter. — Andrew Delbanco

Yet a period's character does affect individual character. Psychology, the study of what happens in our minds, is tightly interwoven with culture, the name we give to our beliefs, practices, and social behaviors. The scholar Andrew Delbanco goes so far as to define culture as a collective psychological notion. "Human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days - pain, desire, pleasure, fear - into a story," Delbanco writes. "When that story leads somewhere and thereby helps us navigate through life to its inevitable terminus in death, it gives us hope. And if such a sustaining narrative establishes itself over time in the minds of a substantial number of people, we call it culture. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

As people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves. — Andrew Delbanco