Levi Strauss
Levi Strauss
Levi Strausswas an American Jewish businessman of German origin who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. His firm, Levi Strauss & Co., began in 1853 in San Francisco, California...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth26 February 1829
CityButtenheim, Germany
CountryUnited States of America
flower men civilization
Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.
feelings sorrow finals
How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time...
music character mean
Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.
past ideas race
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.
confused teaching greatness
Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.
distance moving journey
Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also for better or for worse takes us out of our class context, so that the colour and flavour of certain places cannot be dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them.
years enhancement towns
In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.
loss effectiveness savages
The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.
shining police purpose
The police are not entrusted with a mission which differentiates them from those they serve. Being unconcerned with ultimate purposes, they are inseparable from the persons and interests of their masters, and shine with their reflected glory.
facts mystery humans
These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.
broke stiff
You got them, and they were stiff as a board, and you broke them in.
american-businessman composer delicious experience falling musical stable thrust torn
If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.
american-businessman chosen natural species
We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are 'good to eat' but because they are 'good to think.'
alone among french-scientist individual man nor society
Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.