Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Perfectionism can look like vanity until you remember what Clifford Geertz was actually trying to do: make culture legible without flattening it. “I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I’m satisfied with it” isn’t a writer’s humblebrag so much as a methodological confession. For Geertz, style wasn’t decoration; it was instrumentation. If your subject is meaning-making - rituals, symbols, the messy “webs of significance” people spin - then a sloppy sentence isn’t just ugly, it’s inaccurate.

The intent here is discipline. Geertz signals that interpretation lives and dies at the level of phrasing: the right verb to capture agency, the right qualifier to avoid pretending certainty, the right rhythm to keep complexity from turning into fog. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the research culture that treats writing as an afterthought, something you tack on once the “real work” is done. He’s insisting that the sentence is the experiment, the paragraph the apparatus. If you don’t wrestle the language into precision, you’re not being rigorous; you’re being careless with other people’s lives.

Context matters: Geertz helped legitimize “thick description,” a way of showing not only what people do, but what they think they’re doing. That requires a prose ethic: patience, exactness, and the humility to revise until your claims fit the evidence without overstating it. Satisfied, in this light, doesn’t mean perfect. It means responsible.