Classy Quote logo
  • Home
  • Categories
  • Authors
  • Topics
  • Who said

Modernity Quotes

Modernity quote from classy quote

Anymore, no one's mind is their own.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk Creativity Life Modernity Originality

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

~ Leszek Kołakowski

Leszek Kołakowski Charlatan Doubt Irony Modernity Philosophy Self Criticism

Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do.

~ Tiffany Madison

Tiffany Madison Culture Feminism Life Maleness Modernity Philosophy Popular Culture Postmodernism Western Civilization Wisdom Women S Liberation

Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.

~ Jess C. Scott

Jess C. Scott Beauty Elven Elven Charm Friendship Human Behavior Human Nature Humanity Humankind Humor Insight Insightful Life Life And Death Love Meaning Modern Society Modernism Modernity Postmodern Reflection Reflections Reflective Relationships Rogue Romance Self Self Confidence Self Discovery Self Love Sense Sensibility Series Social Change Society Superficial Superficiality Thief Thief At Night Thief Of Love Thievery Thieves Truth Urban Fantasy Urban Fantasy Series Women Ya Urban Fantasy Young Adult Young Adult Fiction Young Adult Literature Young Adult Novels Young Adult Series

Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.

~ Jess C. Scott

Jess C. Scott Consumerism Cyberpunk Elven Charm Humankind Insightful Life Materialism Modernity Money Self Discovery Society Technology Truth Urban Fantasy

Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.

~ Amit Kalantri

Amit Kalantri 21St Century Quotes Advice Advise Book Books Generation Inspiration Inspirational Inspirational Quotes Knowledge Lose Lost Love Modern Modern Life Modern Quotations Modern Society Modern Times Modernism Modernity Modernization Motivation Motivational Motivational Quotes Read Read Book Reading Reading Books Reading Habits Wisdom

You have the right to promote your own happiness just like everyone else, just like me. Your present dream has been shattered, but you can dream another. You should know that 'you can't relive old dreams.' Even if you force them to come true, they won't bring you happiness.

~ Mao Dun

Mao Dun China Communism Cultural Revolution Dreams Happiness Individualism Modernity Past Responsibility Social Revolution Youth

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.

~ Herman Wouk

Herman Wouk Cities Death Ground Zero Manhattan Modernity Sadism Thanatos Instinct United States

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloudThat's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapersThere are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteriesPortraits of great men and a thousand different headlines(Zone)

~ Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire Advertising Billboard Catalogs Church City Confession Europe European Headlines Language Modernity Mysteries Mystery Novels Newspapers Poetry Pope Pius X Prose Text Words

They are all dead now, Diocletian and Ignatius, Cyril and Hypatia, Julian and Basil, Athanasius and Arîus: every party has yielded up its persecutors and its martyrs, its hates and slanders and aspirations and heroisms, to the arms of that great Silence whose secrets they all claimed so loudly to have read. Even the dogmas for which they fought might seem to be dead too. For if Julian and Sallustius, Gregory and John Chrysostom, were to rise again and see the world as it now is, they would probably feel their personal differences melt away in comparison with the vast difference between their world and this. They fought to the death about this credo and that, but the same spirit was in all of them.

~ Gilbert Murray

Gilbert Murray Faith Modernity

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.

~ Roman Payne

Roman Payne Apollinaire Cash Credit Cards Digital Age Gold Literary Style Literature Modern Life Modernity Money Newspapers Technology Writing Writing Style

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

~ Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Modernity Physics Religion Uncertainty

Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them.

~ Amin Maalouf

Amin Maalouf Knowledge Modernity Progress

Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert's novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. It accompanies poor Emma throughout her days, to her bed of love and to her deathbed, over which two deadly agélastes, Homais and Bournisien, go on endlessly trading their inanities like a kind of funeral oration. But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert's vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!

~ Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Coevolution Education Essay Flaubert Knowledge Modernity Progress Spectrum Stupidity

[To admit that college isn't for everyone] may sound élitist. It may even sound philistine, since the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce well-rounded citizens rather than productive workers. But perhaps it is more foolishly élitist to think that going to school until age 22 is necessary to being well-rounded, or to tell millions of young adults that their futures depend on performing a task that only a minority of them can actually accomplish.It is absurd that people have to get college degrees to be considered for good jobs in hotel management or accounting — or journalism. It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs. The tight connection between college degrees and economic success may be a nearly unquestioned part of our social order. Future generations may look back and shudder at the cruelty of it.

~ Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh Ponnuru Accounting Atrocity College Degree Economy Education Education Reform Hotel Jobs Journalism Knowledge Modernity Money Science

His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.

~ C.s. Lewis

C.s. Lewis Education Modernity

The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform.

~ Christopher Henry Dawson

Christopher Henry Dawson Education History Modernity Politics Science Society

It was Daisuke's conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality to a rigidly predetermined notion of morality. Accordingly, he found the ethical education conducted by lecture in Japanese schools utterly meaningless. In the schools, students were either instructed in the old morality or crammed with a morality suited to the average European. For an unfortunate people beset by the fierce appetites of life, this amounted to nothing more than vain, empty talk. When the recipients of this education saw society before their eyes, they would recall those lectures and burst out laughing. Or else they would feel that they had been made fools of. In Daisuke's case it was not just school; he had received the most rigorous and least functional education from his father. Thanks to this, he had at one time experienced acute anguish stemming from contradictions. Daisuke even felt bitter over it.

~ Sōseki Natsume

Sōseki Natsume Cognitive Dissonance Confucian Culture Clash Education Ethics Imperialism Japan Meiji Modernity Morality Values Western Westernization Youth

I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit Mindfulness Modernity Reflection Slow Technology Thinking Thoughtfulness Time Walking

Further, in the modern story, reality is that which is observable, measurable, and repeatable - the kinds of phenomena available, accessible, and verifiable to the five senses. Thus, reality comes to equal the scientific method. It should come as no surprise that in such a world the life of the spirit is ignored or marginalized (as well as a great many other nonmaterial things.) This view of life subsequently birthed in human beings a ravenous materialism as matters of the soul were ignored or reinterpreted within this tightly controlled version of reality. When the life of the spirit is ignored, people will seek to feed the hunger of a neglected soul with the only nourishment available: in our context, the consumptive acquisition of material goods.

~ Tim Keel

Tim Keel Capitalism Materialism Modernity Science Spirituality

We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity.

~ David Watson

David Watson Enlightenment Modernity Myth Science Social Ecology

What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?

~ Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Cosmopolitan Family Human Race Individualism Modernity Purpose Reason Science Tradition Tribe

Let us not project our own spiritual limitations onto the modern world, for it is not the world which prevents us from being religious. The kind of world we live in shapes the manner and mode of our religiousness

~ Harvey Cox

Harvey Cox Modernity Religion Spirituality

History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ...if you approached the past generously, so to speak—its people as humans, not facts, as modern in their time as we were in ours, who thought and felt as we do, the dead would live again, our equals, not our old-fashioned, hopelessly unenlightened, and backward inferiors. Humanity, to be fully known, had to be seen as changeless as well as ever changing.

~ Tony Hendra

Tony Hendra Change History Humanity Humility Life Modernity Past People

It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work.This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for - or maybe even see - an old man in a rowboat raising his lines...I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.

~ Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry Economy Freedom Irony Modernity Rest Restlessness Slavery

The modern West has been deeply split about freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, it has championed human freedom in many forms - human rights, sexual freedom, political liberty, freedom to choose in many spheres. On the other hand, many of its most intelligent members have not believed that people are free at all, and have devoted great efforts to show that really we are the product of our genes, our unconscious drives, our education, economic pressures, or other forms of conditioning.

~ David F. Ford

David F. Ford Compulsion Freedom Modernity Paradox

But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals? Perhaps—but this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision.

~ Sōseki Natsume

Sōseki Natsume Conflict Freedom Individualism Japan Loneliness Meiji Modernity Tradition

When they brought in communism it was for the people, so they killed the people. Now they've brought in capitalism, which is for the rich, so they only kill the rich. This time you and I have nothing to worry about.

~ Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta Capitalism Capitalism And Death Death Modernity Murder Politics

I'm not a guru. I wish you wouldn't pose these things at me, man. Ask me about women or something.

~ Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski Challenges Guru Life Modernity Problems Society Women

Modernity is kind of a tradition and tradition itself is not a rulebook. It's a dialogue and a dialectical process— just as tradition affects us, we too affect tradition and culture, and we change it.

~ Sharanya Haridas

Sharanya Haridas Change Cultural Change Culture India Indian Authors Modern Modern Society Modernity Tradition Traditional

People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes.You speak in riddles, aged progenitor.The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or p-p-play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.

~ Tony Hendra

Tony Hendra Benedictine Catholic Catholicism Change Eternal Life Modernity Monk Newness Religion Self Spiritual Things

Alecto, have you noticed how downhill this little island is becoming?” Mandy questioned sadly. “All these organic food stores and yoga studios and cellular phone towers… Cape Breton was one of the only places left where it still had that nostalgic small town atmosphere but now… I’ve only been away for a year, how could things have changed so quickly? I mean, how can the world accept it?”“C'est la vie,” said Alecto, looking extremely tired as he stared out the window at the late November maple keys fluttering down from vibrantly red trees lining the streets on either side of the windshield.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

Rebecca Mcnutt Canada Cape Breton Car Cell Phone Change Digital Drive Environmental Life Modernity Nostalgia Nova Scotia Organic Street Technology Tower Windshield Yoga

For better of for worse the church in the West bought modernity's claims. We were baptized in its story (even though it said it did not have one) and accepted its categories and definitions. But somewhere along the way we also began to believe that the ways in which we accessed knowledge about God or Jesus or the Spirit or Christianity were those things themselves.

~ Tim Keel

Tim Keel Christianity Church Culture Modernity

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

~ G.k. Chesterton

G.k. Chesterton Art Modern Art Modernity

Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the “avant-garde” - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored.

~ Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade Art Decline Of Civilization Modernity

Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically modern conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity.

~ Erwin Panofsky

Erwin Panofsky Antiquity Art Classical Individuality Individuation Middle Ages Modern Modernity Objectivity Renaissance Subjectivity Unity

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development — part of what distinguishes the modern from the early modern — has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so — and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few — have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author.

~ James Shapiro

James Shapiro Modernity Readers And Writers Reading

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein Freedom Future Hope Humanity Improvement Intelligence Knowledge Modernity Progress Rationality Technology

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.

~ I.m. Pei

I.m. Pei Architect Architecture Contemporary Architecture Evolution History Modern Modernity Roots

The people's need to share has turned into a massive disease. It has taken them to the most private meaningless part of their lives. In such circumstance, values become redefined and what has been worthless in the past, has become the core value of the new age. The disaster starts where the essence of the discourse changes. The modern age, with all its technological advances, has taken human to the fast fall. We are going down faster than being trapped into a mire. The transition of the discourse has also given us a great gift, senselessness. Therefore, we have transitioned into piles of senseless machines, drained of human essentiality and drowning into a giant mire. The sad part is, due to the lack of true sense, we don't even feel it. Our only safety guard, which is entirely absurd and phantasmagoric, comes from following the majority of the world's population. As long as we feel belonged to preponderancy, our nonsense will absolutely make sense.

~ Kambiz Shabankare

Kambiz Shabankare Drowning Essence Humanity Life Mire Modern Age Modernity Sense Senselessness Share Technology Value World
Load More classy quote icon
  • Classy Quote

    ClassyQuote has been providing 500000+ famous quotes from 40000+ popular authors to our worldwide community.

  • Other Pages

    • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
  • Our Products

    • Chrome Extention
    • Microsoft Edge Add-on
  • Follow Us

    • Facebook
    • Instagram
Copyright © 2025 ClassyQuote. All rights reserved.