Modern Quotes - Page 3

• Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas

  Milan Kundera

  Mean, Ignorance, Ideas

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• The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written.

  Raymond Queneau

  Stories, Love Story, Poignant

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• An unhurried mind brings the capacity to make wise choices every day - choices of how we use our time, of where we place our resources and our love. I am not just talking about avoiding the rat race, but about a life full of an artistic beauty - a life that has almost vanished from modern civilization, but is quite within the reach of everyone.

  Eknath Easwaran

  Wise, Race, Talking

  Eknath Easwaran (2012). “Take Your Time: The Wisdom of Slowing Down”, p.54, Nilgiri Press

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• In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Age, Looks, Too Much

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• Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wall, Thinking, Air

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.549, Simon and Schuster

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• History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Knowledge, History, Doe

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “HENRY DAVID THOREAU - Ultimate Collection: 6 Books, 26 Essays & 60+ Poems, Including Translations. Biographies & Letters (Illustrated): Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada, Canoeing in the Wilderness, Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts, Life Without Principle, Excursions, Poems of Nature, Familiar Letters…”, p.1447, e-artnow

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• The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to; and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Justice

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.113, Delphi Classics

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

  Henry David Thoreau

  Age, Infancy, Died

  Henry David Thoreau (2000). “Walden and Other Writings: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.466, Modern Library

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• The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Faith, Art, Truth

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.155

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• And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Knowledge, Science, Self

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1850). “Nature: Addresses, and Lectures”, p.83

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• 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.

  William Butler Yeats

  Eye, Fire, Feet

  William Butler Yeats (1962). “Poems of William Butler Yeats”, p.193, Hayes Barton Press

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• To be thoroughly modern, an aphorism should trail off vaguely rather than coming to a point.

  Mason Cooley

  Aphorism, Should, Trails

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• The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

  Noam Chomsky

  Attitude, Engineering, Perception

  Noam Chomsky (2016). “Who Rules the World?”, p.83, Metropolitan Books

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• [Comics is] one of the last havens for honesty when it comes to a reader's genuine response to art. Most of us, if we don't find any sympathy or pleasure, for example, in a modern painting, are likely to blame our own ignorance of the history and theory of painting. But nobody pretends to like a bad comic strip. Such harshness is necessary for any real truth to surface, I think, and for art to really contribute anything to life. Though I don't know. I could be wrong.

  Chris Ware

  Art, Honesty, Real

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• The method of Fluxions is the general key by help whereof the modern mathematicians unlock the secrets of Geometry, and consequently of Nature.

  George Berkeley

  Keys, Secret, Helping

  George Berkeley (2016). “The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician”, p.3, Library of Alexandria

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• As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.

  Ted Hughes

  Book, Journey, Watches

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• What's holding me up is I'm confused about the nature of the music. Because the modern music doesn't reach me. I mean to say the sound of the modern electric production. A lot of sequencers... synths. That's what people are buying. Because that doesn't reach me, it throws me back to like 1948, but I don't want to be there. Back there, I'm talking about blues records... The roots of rock'n'roll is rhythm and blues and that's like really where I'm at, where I was always at.

  Joe Strummer

  Confused, Mean, Rocks

  "Strummer on Man, God, Law - and the Clash". Interviewed with Richard Cromelin, articles.latimes.com. January 31, 1988.

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• Masculine ideals have become very confused in the modern world.

  Andrew Dominik

  Confused, World, Masculine

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• How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Law, Progress

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.236, Simon and Schuster

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• It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Science, Simplicity, Elements

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1659, Delphi Classics

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• The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Ocean, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Ernest Spiller, Alfred Riggs Ferguson, Joseph Slater, Jean Ferguson Carr (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, addresses, and lectures”, p.68, Harvard University Press

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• Modern pictures banish depiction for interfering with the workings of paint.

  Mason Cooley

  Paint, Depiction, Interfere

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• Modern literature seduces with insults, riddles, and inside stories.

  Mason Cooley

  Stories, Literature, Insult

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• The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts -- the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other. ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Truth, Men, Thinking

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• The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Learning, Past, Romance

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