Modern Quotes - Page 4

• God the father, and even more often the devil himself, appears at times in the place of fate in the modern tragedy. Why is it thatthis has not induced any scholar to develop a theory of the diabolical genre?

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Father, Fate, Tragedy

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• 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.

  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

  Fear, Passion, Order

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• I read "Pride and Prejudice" [by Jane Austen]. I was gobsmacked by it - it's so funny and so modern. Unbelievable. You don't expect funny to come through after 200 years - humor doesn't transcend decades, let alone centuries.

  Julie Walters

  Pride, Years, Prejudice

  Source: www.digitalspy.com

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• You just wait and see. The lily-livered b*stards in Washington will demobilize. They'll say they've made the world safe for democracy again. The Russians are not such d*mned fools. They'll rebuild; and with modern weapons.

  George S. Patton

  Waiting, Democracy, World

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• Chaykin's Shadow is a modern legend at his best.

  Rick Remender

  Shadow, Legends

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• Sometimes I feel ashamed at my lack of interest in all the new techniques of modern filmmaking, but I prefer to work with as little equipment as possible. If I have a good lens and a steady camera, that's all I need.

  Sven Nykvist

  Needs, Littles, Technique

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

  Milan Kundera

  Mean, Ignorance, Ideas

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Kindness, Character, Doe

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (1909). “Heretics”

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• "True science has no belief," says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton's 'Strange Story;' "true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment." Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick's days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria!

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Latin, Hands, Two

  "Isis Unveiled". Book by Helena Blavatsky. Volume I, Chapter VII, 1877.

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• I hesitate to say what the functions of the modern journalist may be, but I imagine that they do not exclude the intelligent anticipation of the facts even before they occur.

  George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston

  Intelligent, May, Facts

  1898 House of Commons, 29 Mar.

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• Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture.

  Edward Burnett Tylor

  Humanity, Tribes, Culture

  Edward Burnett Tylor (2016). “Primitive Culture”, p.426, Courier Dover Publications

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• City of rest! - as it seems to our modern senses, - how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice!

  Mary Augusta Ward

  Venice, Should Have, Cities

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• The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Different, Culture, Heritage

  "Holding on to Romanticism". "The Illustrated London News" Magazine, May 2, 1931.

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