#Modern Life Quotes

“I am all for your using machines, but do not let them use you.”

“Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes.”

“The good old horse-and-buggy days: then you lived until you died and not until you were run over.”

“In a world of infinite choice people are struggling to figure out what to do.”

“Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper; a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table; and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.”

“We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.”

“Family fun is as necessary to modern living as a kitchen refrigerator.”

“Togetherness, for me, means teamwork. It makes us reflect how completely dependent we are upon one another in our social and commercial life. The more diversified our labors and interests have become in the modern world, the more surely need to integrate our efforts to justify our individual selves and our civilization.”

“I hope all of us may eventually be together in everlasting peace and bliss -- except the inventor of the #‎ telephone .”

“The Internet is a big distraction.”

“At the end of every year, I add up the time that I have spent on the phone on hold and subtract it from my age. I don't count that time as really living. I spend more and more time on hold each year. By the time I die, I'm going to be quite young.”

“Everyone has a telephone. Whether they can afford it or not. It's one of those things that people have, regardless of their income.”

“I don't even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box.”

“I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.”

“I get up in the morning, and I'm reluctant to turn on the television.”

“We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated.”

“Tea is the only simple pleasure left to us.”

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”

“In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.”

“The intensity with which young people live demands that they "blank out" as often as possible.”

“This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle!”

“A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.”

“They can see their neighbors. Roosters and dogs can be heard from there. Still, they will age and die without visiting one another.”

“I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.”

“We live in a time-crunched world, and just about everything we do seems to be urgent.”

“I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me tobe doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.”

“Change may be the vitalizing wind blowing through the house of life, but it is not an abiding force. We need permanent things to soak peace into us as well as progress - the beauty of the earth, seedtime and harvest, the smiles of lovers, the joy of the young in being alive, pride in craftsmanship. Why, oh why must we let ourselves forget these lasting treasures in an age of consuming ambition, speed madness and accumulated goods that leave us no chance to live? If we cannot be contented with a little no wealth will ever satisfy us.”

“A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.”

“It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the party was trying to achieve.”

“On Thanksgiving, you realize you're living in a modern world. Millions of turkeys baste themselves in millions of ovens that clean themselves.”

“TV is the rat race of the century.”

“The only thing we have to fear...is audiovisual glitches at our annual event.”

“You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.”

“pain is inevitable,suffering is optional... we have bigger houses,but smaller families. More conveniences,but less time. We have knowledge,but less judgements; more experts,but more problems ; more medicines but less health.”

“Modern man drives a mortgaged car over a bond-financed highway on credit-card gas.”

“Home, nowadays, is a place where part of the family waits till the rest of the family brings the car back”

“Technology is constantly improving our lives. Look at the cellular telephone. Just ten years ago, virtually nobody was able to get into a car crash caused by trying to steer and dial at the same time; today, people do this all the time.”

“People now feel time accelerating. Lists allow them to feel some sense of accomplishment.”

“Lists today are a way of trying to get through the day, because we are losing a sense of time.”

“I am absolutely sick unto death of hearing people say - they all say this; it must be Item One on the curriculum in Trend College - "I just hate to talk to a machine!" They say this as though it is a major philosophical position, as opposed to a description of a minor neurosis. My feeling is, if you have a problem like this, you shouldn't go around trumpeting it; you should stay home and practice talking to a machine you can feel comfortable with, such as your Water Pik, until you are ready to assume your place in modern society.”

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”

“Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.”

“As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.”

“The world is progressing and resources are becoming more abundant. I'd rather go into a grocery store today than a king's banquet a hundred years ago.”

“When I walk into a grocery store and look at all the products you can choose, I say, "My God!" No king ever had anything like I have in my grocery store today.”