Modernity Quotes

• It takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place.

  Lewis Carroll

  Running, Philosophical, Wonderland

  Lewis Carroll (1976). “Alice Through the Looking Glass: Musical”, p.13, Dramatic Publishing

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• Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

  Lewis Carroll

  Running, Somewhere Else, Wonderland

  Through the Looking-Glass ch. 2 (1872)

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• Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

  Salvador Dali

  Modern, Bother, One Thing

  "Diary of a Genius" by Salvador Dali, Creation Books, (p. 42), 1998.

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• Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

  Bryan Appleyard

  World, May, Absence

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• To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.

  Marshall Berman

  Adventure, Power, Joy

  Marshall Berman (1983). “All that is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity”, p.15, Verso

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• Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.

  Le Corbusier

  Eye, Style, Unhappiness

  Le Corbusier (2013). “Towards a New Architecture”, p.3, Courier Corporation

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• Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

  Theodor Adorno

  Categories, Qualitative

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.218, Verso

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• When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.

  Eric Hoffer

  Modernism, Industry

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Modernity is the ensemble of changes - intellectual, political, economic, social, cultural, technological, aesthetic - that have altered the world drastically since roughly the 17th century, until which time the world was, in the above respects, far less different from the world of any previous epoch of recorded history than it is from the world of today. The modern predicament is the set of problems these changes have bequeathed us.

  George Scialabba

  Political, Intellectual, Different

  Source: thenewinquiry.com

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• Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.

  Robertson Davies

  Old Fashioned, Grows

  Robertson Davies (1982). “High spirits”, Penguin Group USA

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• Modernity is not about dress codes.

  Queen Rania of Jordan

  Dresses, Dress Code, Code

  Source: content.time.com

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• Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Art, Elements, Half

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• What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Cutting, Past, Together

  Zygmunt Bauman (2013). “Liquid Modernity”, p.43, John Wiley & Sons

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• I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.

  Italo Calvino

  May, Assuming, Form

  Italo Calvino (2010). “Invisible Cities”, p.123, Random House

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• We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Peace, Nice, Passion

  Jean Baudrillard (1990). “Cool Memories”, p.24, Verso

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• We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.

  Jacque Fresco

  Health, Cities, Political

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• I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.

  Angela Carter

  Fun, Book, Mean

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• The liquid state of modernity is corrosive to continuity.

  Samuel Wilson

  Liquid, States, Continuity

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• Religion and modernity are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

  Queen Rania of Jordan

  Exclusive

  "More Questions with Queen Rania". Q&A, content.time.com. May 11, 2007.

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• Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised.

  Marilyn Manson

  Change, Time, Media

  "47 years of Marilyn Manson: Has the society finally understood him?". www.radioandmusic.com. January 5, 2016.

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• A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

  Elias Canetti

  Men, Lice, Add

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• If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age

  Karel Appel

  Art, Age, Avant Garde

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• 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

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• He who sups with the devil had better have a long spoon. The devilry of modernity has its own magic: The [believer] who sups with it will find his spoon getting shorter and shorter--until that last supper in which he is left alone at the table, with no spoon at all and with an empty plate. The devil, one may guess, will by then have gone away to more interesting company.

  Peter L. Berger

  Gone Away, Long, Interesting

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• Being concerned about other people is especially relevant in today's world. If we consider the complex inter-connected ness of our modern lives, how we depend on others and others depend on us, our outlook will change. We’ll begin to see 'others' not as somehow distant from us, but as people we are in touch with, people close to us; we will no longer feel indifferent to them.

  Dalai Lama

  Change, Buddhist, Buddhism

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