Middlebrow Quotes & Sayings

The most critical of these new religious developments for twentieth-century religious liberalism were a renewed and transformed emphasis on mystical practice and experience, the healing ministry known as mind cure, and the rise of modern psychology. These three interrelated spiritual innovations spread as significant components of popular religion in large part through the mass print media. Rather than religious movements dependent on revivalism or church life, these were first and foremost discourses, creatures of the printed word. Initially explored only by an avant-garde of liberal intellectuals late in the nineteenth century, the new books and ideas emerging at the margins of liberal Protestantism eventually reached a nation-wide middle-class audience. The mass media unleashed by nineteenth-century evangelicalism enabled the alternative spiritualities of the twentieth century to flourish, especially with the rise of religious middlebrow culture in the decades after World War I. — Matthew Hedstrom

As a pianist, our particular role is to enter a piece and its logic and create a particular interpretation from our understanding. The most important thing for the performer is, after all, to create a special atmosphere - we enter the composer's feelings and emotions and recreate them freshly for a given audience. — Rafal Blechacz

If you hear enough applause and laughter at a young enough age, you are doomed to become an actor. — John Lithgow

Publishing has gone very middlebrow. It's turned its back on legacy of modernism and gone into a humanist mode. When people go through art school they are exposed to the history of the avant-garde, and there's a general understanding that what you're doing as an artist is to a large extent, not just regurgitating that history, but engaging with it. There's this denial of that in the mainstream publishing world. — Tommy McCarthy

The Law can only chase a man to Calvary, no further. — Dwight L. Moody

Like one of those fake-smart, middlebrow TV shows, the speciousness of The Social Network is disguised by topicality. It's really a movie excusing Hollywood ruthlessness. — Armond White

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

The middlebrow, I hate. — Leslie Fiedler

When you had to do something, you had to do it. And eventually, if you were lucky, you did it well. — Sarah Dessen

If you wish to educate a child who has gone wrong, then you must, above all, keep your attention fixed on the intersection of two charmed circles. — Alfred Adler

There is a middlebrow snobbery in America that praises everything on public television and disdains everything on the commercial networks as a blight. — Henry Fairlie

For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it's a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it's changing the world, like if 'This American Life' suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders. — Alex Pareene

In my garden, which is a big garden, I have one part that is my bird garden, and every morning, 365 days a year, they get buckets of food - for the birds, for the squirrels, the chipmunks and the turtles in the summer. — Barbara Mandrell

Since 1960s pop art the art world has been happy for artists to use the lowbrow to add zest and authenticity to their works. But middlebrow has resonances of the suburban bourgeousie who might see art as aspirational by association. — Grayson Perry

Robert Scott Leyse channels Baudelaire's Queen of Spades and Jack of Hearts, speaking darkly of dead loves, in this new book. He also reminds me of James Purdy's notorious eccentricity. There's plenty of middlebrow stuff if you want it. Self-Murder isn't that. — Kris Saknussemm