Modernity Quotes

Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose.

The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.

How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ?

Modern marriage has lost its meaning--consequently it is being abolished.

Modern civilization has taught us to convert night into day and golden silence into brazen din and noise.

As much as possible, and this as quickly as possible: that is what the great mental and emotional illness craves that is variously called "present" or "culture," but that is actually a symptom of consumption.

It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

The Cold War has been over for a long time. I'm not interested in having battles that, frankly, started before I was born.

Without electricity, the air would rot.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.

And believe it or not, she has a phone and everything. She stopped using smoking signals last year.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes - it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.

Modern man is battered by the fundamental forces of his own psyche.

Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.

It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past.

I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond!

It used to be about trying to do something. Now it's about trying to be someone.

Our society has become an employee society.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.

Be versed in ancient lore, and familiarize yourself with the modern; then may you become teachers.

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.

Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror

The newer people of this modern age are more eager to amass than to realize.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

Nowadays you can no longer let yourself be indoctrinated - the world is changing so fast! Even what you wanted twenty years ago is no longer relevant today; it's outdated.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it.

You're really spread out now, you've got stuff all over the WORLD! You've got stuff at home, stuff in storage, stuff in Honolulu, stuff in Maui, stuff in your pockets...supply lines are getting longer and harder to maintain.

The clatter of a changing world is not pleasant, and those who have enjoyed the comforts and protection of the old order may be shocked and unhappy when they behold the vigorous young builders of a new world sweeping away their time-honored antiquities.

It hurts me to think that people in their rush for everything modern despise all their ancient traditions and ignore them in their lives.

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.

Faced with a world of "modern ideas" which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of "greatness," on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity.

To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

Instead of the scream of a fish hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower.

We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past.

Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.

If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?

The modern naturalist must realize that in some of its branches his profession, while more than ever a science, has also become an art.

Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.

We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.

The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development--

These are the days of lasers in the jungle, staccato signals of constant information.

As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.

[the difference between the old and the new education being] in a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

A modern author would have died in infancy in a ruder age.

The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.