Modern Quotes

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It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality.

Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.

In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.

Thorstein Veblen

Seasonal changes, as it were, take place in history, when there is practically an almost universal death, a falling of the foliage of the tree of life. Such were the intervals between the ancient and mediaeval time, the mediaeval and the modern.

George Edward Woodberry

Some, of my unmathematical friends have incautiously urged me to include a note about the origin of modern calculating machines. This is the proper place to do so, as the Queen of queens has enslaved a few of these infernal things to do some of her more repulsive drudgery. What I shall say about these marvelous aids to the feeble human intelligence will be little indeed, for two reasons: I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.

Eric Temple Bell

In the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that most comfortable vanity which whispers in our ears that failures are not faults!

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Jean-François Lyotard

It may be said that modern Europe with teachers who inform it that its realist instincts are beautiful, acts ill and honors what is ill.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Charles Baudelaire

A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one.

Mary Augusta Ward

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Georges Bernanos

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear – and even, in certain respects, would be –the most modern of critical movements.

Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

Albert Jay Nock

In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.

Pakistan is heir to an intellectual tradition of which the illustrious exponent was the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. He saw the future course for Islamic societies in a synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age.

Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is — and that is the point I want to stress — that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word... I ask whether it is not possible to see in the present social conflict of the world an analogous struggle between two, three, five equally serious verities and equally generous idealisms? I think it is possible, and that is the most dramatic element in modern civilization, that a human truth is opposed to another human truth no less human, ideal against ideal, positive worth against worth no less positive, instead of the struggle being as we are so often told, one between noble truth and vile selfish error.

One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.

One of the most feared expressions in modern times is 'The computer is down.'

Norman R. Augustine

Faced with a world of "modern ideas" which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of "greatness," on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.

With respect to modern languages, French, as I have before observed, is indispensible. Next to this the Spanish is most important to an American. Our connection with Spain is already important and will become daily more so. Besides this the antient part of American history is written chiefly in Spanish.

Thomas Jefferson

I'm sorry, but I do hate this differentiation between the sexes. 'The modern girl has a thoroughly businesslike attitude to life' That sort of thing. It's not a bit true! Some girls are businesslike and some aren't. Some men are sentimental and muddle-headed, others are clear-headed and logical. There are just different types of brains.

Agatha Christie

Be versed in ancient lore, and familiarize yourself with the modern; then may you become teachers.