It is religion which has made modern Europe what she is by its stability amid the ruin of nations, by adapting itself to circumstances, to times, and places, without ever abating an iota of its unshaken principles.
A genuinely free and educated man should be able to tune himself, as one tunes a musical instrument, absolutely arbitrarily, at his convenience at any time and to any degree, philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, in ancient or modern form.
There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo.
When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.
The passion of fear (as a modern philosopher informs me) determines the spirits of the muscles of the knees, which are instantly ready to perform their motion, by taking up the legs with incomparable celerity, in order to remove the body out of harm's way.
I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.
In the modern world the intelligence of public opinion is the one indispensable condition for social progress.
Defeatism about the feasibility of plans for disarmament and ordered peace has been the most calamitious of all the errors made by democratic governments in modern times.
Nowadays, the practice of yoga stops with just asanas. Very few even attempt dharana and dhyana (deeper meditation) with seriousness. There is a need to search once more and reestablish the practice and value of yoga in modern times.
People must ask themselves why this earthquake occurred in this area and not in others. These areas were notorious because of this type of modern tourism, which has become known as "sex tourism". Don't they deserve punishment from Allah?!
Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.
The most far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt of woman against sex servitude. The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting a compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them.
It is possible to see slavery and serfdom merely as extreme early forms of autocratic management, in which employees had no voice whatsoever in the work process and were viewed not as human beings but as alienated forms of individual wealth. Slavery, in this sense, did not die; it continues in modern dress in contemporary organizations wherever managers exercise autocratic power, unequal status, or arbitrary privileges, no matter how scientific the terminology or postmodern the image
Only uncomfortable chairs become antiques - the comfortable ones are worn out by hard use.
It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers--men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton--have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times--a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime.
I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things
The essence of modernity is that progress no longer waits on genius; instead we have learned to put our faith in the organized efforts of ordinary men. Science is as old as the race, but the effective organization of science is new. Ancient science, like placer mining, was a pursuit of solitary prospectors. Nuggets of truth were found, but the total wealth of knowledge increased slowly. Modern man began to transform this world when he began to mine the hidden veins of knowledge systematically.
The modern haematologist, instead of describing in English what he can see, prefers to describe in Greek what he can’t.
One feature which will probably most impress the mathematician accustomed to the rapidity and directness secured by the generality of modern methods is the deliberation with which Archimedes approaches the solution of any one of his main problems.
When I was at Manchester, where there was a modern swimming pool, I was looked on as a great man, not for so trivial a reason as being an FRS, but because I used to dive off a five-metre board.
There is a close relationship between a house full of possessions and a heart full of desires, between a cluttered closet and a crowded schedule, between having no place to put possessions and having no priorities for our life. These are precious clues. They remind us to slow down, to live in the present, to reduce the desires that drain our vitality, to clarify priorities so we can give our time and attention to what matters most. Tragically, in the press of modern life, we have managed to get backwards one of life's most vital truths: people are to be loved; things are to be used.
Our common goal should be the development of a system of equal security for all governments. System adequate [to deal with] modern threats, built on regional and global nonaligned bases. Only then can we ensure peace and tranquility in the world.
Modern women are squeezed between the devil and the deep blue sea, and there are no lifeboats out there in the form of public policies designed to help these women combine their roles as mothers and as workers.
The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.
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