Nineteenth Century Quotes - Page 6

• the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.

  Oscar Wilde

  Depressing, Real, Modern Life

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (Diversion Classics)”, p.34, Diversion Books

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• In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.

  Nicholas D. Kristof

  Believe, Struggle, Challenges

  Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn (2009). “Half the Sky”, p.17, Vintage

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• the truth is, I am heartily sick of this life & of the nineteenth century in general. (I am convinced that every thing is going wrong.)

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Sick, Truth Is, Century

  Edgar Allan Poe (2004). “The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe”, p.445, Wordsworth Editions

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• I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.

  John Green

  Dawn, Fields, Moral

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.82, Penguin

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• Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Reading, Men, Hands

  "The Marriage Plot: A Novel". Book by Jeffrey Eugenides, 2011.

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• It was only in the late nineteenth century and then the twentieth century, with the maturation of consumer capitalism, that a shift was made toward the cultivation of unbounded desire. We must appreciate this to realize that late modern consumption, consumption as we now know it, is not fundamentally about materialism or the consumption of physical goods. Affluence and consumer-oriented capitalism have moved us well beyond the undeniable efficiencies and benefits of refrigeration and indoor plumbing.

  Rodney Clapp

  Appreciate, Desire, Benefits

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• What Smith and Marx have in common is that they were both philosophers of great vision and perceptiveness, deep humanity, and a sense of social reality that has been lost in the abstractly formalistic economic theories that have dominated the field since the last third of the nineteenth century.

  Allen W. Wood

  Reality, Humanity, Vision

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The way we look at nineteenth-century English social realism and appreciate the working classes of the emerging industrial revolution.

  Patricia Piccinini

  Class, Appreciate, Looks

  Source: www.lucyreesart.com

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• For instance, the notion of non-penal substitution. This idea, found in the work of the nineteenth century Scottish Reformed theologian John McLeod Campbell and based upon his reading of the letter to the Hebrews in particular, is that Christ offers up his life and death as a penitential act on our behalf, rather than as a punishment in our stead.

  Oliver D. Crisp

  Reading, Punishment, Ideas

  Source: edwardsstudies.com

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• The typical old-fashioned diet (in the nineteenth century) was so bad it almost assembled modern dieting.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Funny, Humor, Loss

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• Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods.

  Carl Sagan

  Suicide, Atheist, Men

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• Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.

  Mark Twain

  Baseball, Struggle, Expression

  Mark Twain (1929). “Stormfield Edition of the Writings of Mark Twain [pseud.].: Mark Twain's speeches”

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• For arousing compassion, the nineteenth-century yogi Patrul Rinpoche suggested imagining beings in torment - an animal about to be slaughtered, a person awaiting execution. To make it more immediate, he recommended imagining ourselves in their place. Particularly painful is his image of a mother with no arms watching as a raging river sweeps her child away. To contact the suffering of another being fully and directly is as painful as being in the woman's shoes.

  Pema Chodron

  Mother, Children, Animal

  Pema Chodron (2002). “The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times”, p.65, Shambhala Publications

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• So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Differences, Careers, Wife

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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• [ Jonathan] Edwards is the person who really made theological determinism a serious option for Reformed thinkers, and the influence his views had in nineteenth century Reformed thought, in the USA and the UK in particular, is enormous.

  Oliver D. Crisp

  Views, Usa, Serious

  Source: edwardsstudies.com

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• One of the things that really impressed me about Anna Karenina when I first read it was how Tolstoy sets you up to expect certain things to happen - and they don't. Everything is set up for you to think Anna is going to die in childbirth. She dreams it's going to happen, the doctor, Vronsky and Karenin think it's going to happen, and it's what should happen to an adulteress by the rules of a nineteenth-century novel. But then it doesn't happen. It's so fascinating to be left in that space, in a kind of free fall, where you have no idea what's going to happen.

  Elif Batuman

  Dream, Fall, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

  Julian Barnes

  Genius, Syphilis, Century

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• In the mid to late nineteenth century, the gun manufacturers recognized that they had a limited market. Remember that this is a capitalist society, you've got to expand your market. They were selling guns to the military. That's a pretty limited market. What about all the rest of the people? So what started was all kinds of fantastic stories about Wyatt Earp and the gunmen and the Wild West, how exciting it was to have these guys with guns defending themselves against all sorts of things.

  Noam Chomsky

  Military, Gun, People

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan Collini's phrase, "public moralists" and politicians, plutocrats, bankers, arms dealers, and experts and technocrats were not solely defining the moral norms as well as the political lives of our societies. We do have some writers claiming to be public moralists, but, as I said, they have actually been more jingoistic than even the henchmen of Bush and Blair.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Political, Bankers, Experts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways of assessing the latter. There are people who will continue to write nineteenth-century novels in the early twenty-first, and even win major prizes for them, but that's not very interesting, intellectually or emotionally.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Winning, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Connections, Done

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• I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature in the nineteenth century comes close - so exclusively produced by and closely identified with a tiny but powerful ruling elite, the upper-caste, Anglophone upper middle class, and dependent for so long on book buyers and readers elsewhere.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Powerful, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Classic nineteenth century European imperialists believed they were literally on a mission. I don't believe that the imperialists these days have that same sense of public service. They are simply pirates. Yes, there are fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, who appear to be in charge of the White House at the moment, but they are very different from the Christian gentlemen who ran the British Empire and believed they were doing good works around the world. These days it's about naked power.

  John Pilger

  Christian, Believe, White

  Source: progressive.org

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• In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.

  Colin Wilson

  Men, Thinking, Years

  "The Encyclopedia of Modern Murder 1962-1983". Book by Colin Wilson, Introductory Essay, p. xiv, 1983.

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• If you look at the early nineteenth century you see the idea that we educate children to be voters and to be participants in our popular democracy. And then at the turn of the century when more and more immigrants are coming into the schools, Americanization becomes a more explicit part of the agenda.

  Dana Goldstein

  Children, School, Ideas

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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