86 Modernity Quotes

I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism, let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than, quite simply, to be at all times caught in the dominant forms of the moment.

The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.

Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.

Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.

Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.

The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.

By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife.

Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image.

Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult.

A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.

Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church for centuries as a brilliant jewel, and retains its value undiminished even in our time when the outlook of men and the state of the world have undergone such profound changes.

Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.

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.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

The maddest phenomenon in this wholly mad world - that the filming or wirelessing of an event, whether it is the Grand National or an attack in force on the Maginot Line, is held to be of more importance than the event itself.

There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness: is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase ''the pursuit of happiness'' is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.

Historical thought was to deliver man from subjection to a divinity; but this liberation demanded of him the most absolute subjection to historical evolution. The man takes refuge in the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar. That is why the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I'm referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man. However, there's no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, - glittering like the morning star full of life and splendour and joy... Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, - in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.

There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.

In spite of increasing production and comfort, man loses more and more the sense of self, feels that his life is meaningless, even though such a feeling is largely unconscious. In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living. (New York: Liveright, 1970, p. 8)

People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it? - Interview in the English newspaper The Independent, 15 October 2005.

I've read the books. God is not a moderate. There's no place in the books where God says, 'You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.'

The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed; Grey Truth is now her painted toy; Yet still she turns her restless head.

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create, Timid, entangled, empty and abashed, Lacking the countenance of our friends.

'Only the modern city,' Hegel dares to write, 'offers the mind a field in which it can become aware of itself.' We are thus living in the period of big cities. Deliberately, the world has been amputated of all that constitutes its permanence: nature, the sea, hilltops, evening meditation. Consciousness is to be found only in the streets, because history is to be found only in the streets - this is the edict.

They [the Greeks] were the first Westerners; the spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation. ~ Ch. 3

In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy - or tragedy above us.

A strange fellow, this Degas - sickly, a bundle of nerves, with such weak eyes that he is afraid of going blind, yet for these very reasons extremely sensitive to the character of things. He is more skillful in capturing the essence of modern life than anyone I know.

Nay, if there's room for poets in the world A little overgrown, (I think there is) Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne's,-this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.

'The modern world stinks.'

'All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense.'

'The men of faith might claim for their positions ancient tradition, practical usefulness, and spiritual desirability, but one query could prick all such bubbles: Is it scientific? That question has searched religion for contraband goods, stripped it of old superstitions, forced it to change its categories of thought and methods of work, and in general has so cowed and scared religion that many modern-minded believers... instinctively throw up their hands at the mere whisper of it... When a prominent scientist comes out strongly for religion, all the churches thank Heaven and take courage, as though it were the highest possible compliment to God to have Eddington believe in Him. Science has become the arbiter of this generation's thought, until to call even a prophet and a seer 'scientific' is to cap the climax of praise.'

I don't have a sense of sanctuary. I don't have a place where I think I can go. I once went to the famous Kyoto temple with the Zen garden, the gravel, the little mounds and it's, you know, it's been pictured over and over and over again. And what they don't tell you is that this little acre or some acre of serenity is surrounded by millions of people taking pictures. So it sounds like a storm of mosquitoes constantly. And it never stops. And there's no serenity. And so not even in Japan can I find sanctuary.

In our brave new world, blushing is a form of nostalgia.

Well, me too, at times, I have to admit, I'm a victim of the pressures of modern life. I know that one of these days something's going to snap in my head and I'll start imagining that I'm a two and a half mile section of the East Lancs Road or something - or Phil Collins, whichever is the least interesting. (after playing 'Rat Race' by Sizzler)

But now, in this century of ideologies, the Gods and Destiny have been given new life. 'Miracles in the world are many,' Sophocles wrote in the fifth century BC. 'There is no greater miracle than man.' Suddenly, at the end of the twentieth century, we discover that no, after all, it isn't true. Historical inevitability is a greater miracle than man. As is the dialectic. As is the superiority of various groups according to blood type. As is the genius of an abstract mechanism called the market. As is the leadership of inanimate objects - called technology - which worker bees create and then, inevitably, are led by. These inevitabilities are great leaps backward into the arms of the Gods and Destiny.

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship may be called throughout prosaic and modern. The Romantic sinks to ruin, the Poesy of Nature, the Wonderful. The Book treats merely of common worldly things: Nature and Mysticism are altogether forgotten. It is a poetised civic and household History; the Marvellous is expressly treated therein as imagination and enthusiasm. Artistic Atheism is the spirit of the Book. ... It is properly a Candide, directed against Poetry: the Book is highly unpoetical in respect of spirit, poetical as the dress and body of it are.

We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, ...We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order... We see change as being order itself--indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one. -- Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)

The upshot is that the values and goals which provided a unifying center for previous centuries in the modern period no longer are cogent. We have not yet found the new center which will enable us to choose our goals constructively, and thus to overcome the painful bewilderment and anxiety of not knowing which way to move. Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a 'slave-morality.' Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being 'de-humanized,' and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identify as persons.

Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.[2]

In the West, you have bigger homes, yet smaller families; you have endless conveniences - yet you never seem to have any time. You can travel anywhere in the world, yet you don't bother to cross the road to meet your neighbours.

Asked if he had ever conducted any Stockhausen, he said, 'No, but I once trod in some.'

Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx--my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me--we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!) [citation needed]

Speak of the moderns without contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry.

'When we are equipped with leadership skills that complement traditional rank, we are appropriately prepared to provide the inspiration, the motivation and guidance expected of us. The ethos of 'vakaturaga' (chiefly way) will then retain its true place in Fijian culture in this new millennium.'

I do not care what face other ages and other people have given to the enormous, faceless essence. They have crammed it with human virtues, with rewards and punishments, with certain ties. They have given a face to their hopes and fears, they have submitted their anarchy to a rhythm, they have found a higher justification by which to live and labor. They have fulfilled their duty. But today we have gone beyond these needs; we have shattered this particular mask of the Abyss; our God no longer fits under the old features. Our hearts have overbrimmed with new agonies, with new luster and silence. The mystery has grown savage, and God has grown greater. The dark powers ascend, for they have also grown greater, and the entire human island quakes. Let us stoop down to our hearts and confront the Abyss valiantly. Let us try to mold once more, with our flesh and blood, the new, contemporary face of God. For our God is not an abstract thought, a logical necessity, a high and harmonious structure made of deductions and speculations. He is not an immaculate, neutral, odorless, distilled product of our brains, neither male nor female. He is both man and woman, mortal and immortal, dung and spirit. He gives birth, fecundates, slaughters - death and eros in one - and then he begets and slays once more, dancing spaciously beyond the boundaries of a logic which cannot contain the antinomies.

Dear Lord Baby Jesus, lying there in your...your little ghost manger, lookin' at your Baby Einstein developmental...videos, learnin' 'bout shapes and colors...

Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux. (I have come too late into a world too old.)

'The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII...Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near' (this quotation is useful for explanations of the period of art nouveau, and the causes of the art movement)

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

Nowadays, manners are easy and life is hard.

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they 'own' their bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!

There was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. He didn't call his Father and Mother 'Father' and 'Mother', but Harold and Alberta. They [his family] were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and tee-totallers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open. (ch. 1)

To the seeker after the new, or the sensational, to those who expect a sinister frisson from modern music, it is my melancholy duty to point out that all the bomb throwing and guillotining has already taken place.

There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now.

[God, who was James Mason, to Noah] 'Noah, stop what you're doing and build me an ark!' [Noah, who was Sean Connery] 'I'm working on a speed boat at the moment. Much more exciting. It'll really kick ass, give great photographs for the people in Bible.'

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

We sat in the car park till twenty to one And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

It is a callous age; we have seen so many marvels that we are ashamed to marvel more; the seven wonders of the world have become seven thousand wonders.

For the history of the centuries that have passed since the birth of Christ nowhere reveals conditions like those of the present. There has never been such building and planting in the world. There has never been such gluttonous and varied eating and drinking as now. Wearing apparel has reached its limit in costliness. Who has ever heard of such commerce as now encircles the earth? There have arisen all kinds of art and sculpture, embroidery and engraving, the like of which has not been seen during the whole Christian era. In addition men are so delving into the mysteries of things that today a boy of twenty knows more than twenty doctors formerly knew.

People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age.

Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.

The modern man is . . . certain about his essential virtue . . . [and since] he does not see that he has a freedom of spirit which transcends both nature and reason . . . [he] is unable to understand the real pathos of his defiance of nature's and reason's laws. He always imagines himself betrayed into this defiance either by some accidental corruption in his past history or by some sloth of reason. Hence he hopes for redemption, either through a program of social reorganization or by some scheme of education.

What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought... occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like... because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.

We'd love it if we could all just come home and not worry about the rest of the world, as Ron Paul says. But the problem is, they attacked us on 9/11. We were here; they attacked us. We want to help move the world of Islam toward modernity so they can reject the extreme...

We can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world.

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.

From the way of Go, the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.