Modern Life Quotes - Page 5

• Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overextend ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern life is simplicity.

  Sogyal Rinpoche

  Keys, Simplicity, Balance

  18 Copy quote

• The ideological are individuals ultimately swamped by the complexities of modern life and political and economic relations; they have deliberately attached themselves to some caricatural maven like Falwell or Limbaugh who speaks to their manipulable pathos. The gulf between such individuals' education or intellectual competence or information and the actual issues of our times is simply too great. They were bred to be culture-media for false consciousness, junkies who crawl on their bellies across broken glass for another hit of "clarifying wisdom" from some ideological Pope.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Media, Issues

  4 Copy quote

• Now, because men of our contemporary age are caught up in the ascetic view of a life-denying religious system, but in spite of this cannot deny the primal laws of nature, a distorted morality had to be developed, which spreads hypocritical appearances over hidden actions. This has brought to a head all those outward forms of modern life, whose vacuousness and corruption are now beginning to disgust us.

  Guido von List

  Life, Religious, Nature

  23 Copy quote

• A pedestrian ought to be legally allowed to toss at least one hand grenade at a motorist every day.

  Brendan Behan

  Hands, Toss, Pedestrians

  7 Copy quote

• Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

  John Dewey

  Mean, Independent, Mind

  John Dewey (1977). “The Middle Works, 1899-1924”, p.229, SIU Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• One listens to one's lawyer prattle on as long as one can stand it and then signs where indicated.

  Alexander Woollcott

  Law, Long, Lawyer

  16 Copy quote

• A cynic might suggest as the motto of modern life this simple legend-"just as good as the real.

  Charles Dudley Warner

  Real, Simple, Legends

  Charles Dudley Warner (1872). “Back-log studies and My summer in a garden”, p.3

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Education, Moving, Science

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Aims of Education”, p.14, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Now when I bore people at a party they think it's their fault.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Party, Power, Thinking

  5 Copy quote

• A man never feels more important than when he receives a telegram containing more than ten words.

  George Ade

  Men, Important, Feels

  George Ade (1960). “The America of George Ade, 1866-1944: Fables, Short Stories, Essays”, New York, Putnam [1960]

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Liquid, Circumstances, Permanent

  121 Copy quote

• I wouldn't say that processed food, ready meals and even takeaways aren't relevant to modern life, it's just that over the past 40 years there are three generations of people who have come out of school and gone through their home life without ever being shown how to cook properly.

  Jamie Oliver

  School, Home, Past

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of numbers of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the modern life as pervasive and controlling as it is.

  Ralph Adams Cram

  Numbers, Weight, Influence

  RALPH ADAMS CRAM (1922). “TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.

  Oscar Wilde

  Running, Danger, Cowardly

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “Aphorisms”, p.16, Oscar Wilde

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.

  William Carlos Williams

  Art, Lying, Writing

  William Carlos Williams (1920). “Kora in Hell: Improvisations”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Oil, Clothes, America

  21 Copy quote

• I think the messiness and embodied nature of modern life just produces an enhanced signal for our attention.

  Richard Davidson

  Thinking, Focus, Attention

  7 Copy quote

• The problem of living in this modern world is the problem of finding room in it. The crowd principle is so universally at work through modern life that the geography of the world had been changed to conform to it. We live in crowds. We get our living in crowds. We are amused in herds.

  Gerald Stanley Lee

  Principles, World, Crowds

  Gerald Stanley Lee (1913). “Crowds: A Moving-picture of Democracy”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.

  Jonathan Gottschall

  Real, Giving, People

  4 Copy quote

• Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.

  Richard Wilbur

  Men, Thinking, Sea

  1957 'Pangloss's Song', from Candide.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The single factor most responsible for the disruption of the family is the automobile. Its full effect cannot be assessed. Modern life, as we know, would be impossible without the ubiquitous motorcar. It broke up the old family and community.

  Alexander Lowen

  Community, Would Be, Impossible

  14 Copy quote

• O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife.

  Matthew Arnold

  Heart, Sick, Disease

  'The Scholar-Gipsy' (1853) l. 201

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Class, Together, Fascination

  4 Copy quote

• Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends.

  Jacques Ellul

  Mean, Reality, Civilization

  Jacques Ellul (2016). “Presence in the Modern World: A New Translation”, p.43, Wipf and Stock Publishers

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Anti-Islamist Muslims - who wish to live modern lives, unencumbered by burqas, fatwas and violent visions of jihad - are on the defensive and atomized. However eloquent, their individual voices cannot compete with the roar of militant Islam's determination, money (much of it from overseas) and violence. As a result, militant Islam, with its West-phobia and goal of world hegemony, dominates Islam in the West and appears to many to be the only kind of Islam.

  Daniel Pipes

  Determination, Voice, Goal

  "Voices of Islam". New York Post, September 23, 2003.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source