Middlebrow Culture 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

If happiness is what you're after, then you are going to be let down frequently and be unhappy much of your time. Joy, though, is something else. It's not a choice, not a response to some result, it is a constant. Joy is 'the feeling we have from doing what we are fashioned to do,' no matter the outcome. — Matthew McConaughey

I no longer believe in literary schools now; I believe in the individual. — Jorge Luis Borges

In the Bible, God never gives anyone an easy job. God never comes to Abraham, or Moses, or Esther and says, "I'd like you to do me a favor, but it really shouldn't take much time. I wouldn't want to inconvenience you." God does not recruit like someone from the PTA. He is always intrusive, demanding, exhausting. He says we should expect that the world will be hard, and that our assignments will be hard. — John Ortberg

That was the beginning of the Cuban missile crisis - a confrontation between the two giant atomic nations, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., which brought the world to the abyss of nuclear destruction and the end of mankind. From — Robert F. Kennedy

'The Blacklist' was really right place, right time. I read the script and met with Jon Bokenkamp, John Eisendrath, John Fox and John Davis, and we just hit it off. They understood that I was not so much trying to adapt to television, but adapt a cinematic style to the things that we were gonna do. — Joe Carnahan

Vashet: "I will admit, I've never had a studen offer himself up for a vicious beating in order to prove he's worth my time."
Kvothe: "That was nothing. Once I jumped off a roof. — Patrick Rothfuss

My message to everyone: the next time you hear about migrant children near the border, just picture them as your own. Then think what you would want our government to do. — Al Sharpton

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

You have to understand your own personal DNA. Don't do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it. — Gary Vaynerchuk

To have lived long does not necessarily imply the gathering of much wisdom and experience. One who has pedaled twenty-five thousand miles on a stationary bicycle has not circled the globe. He or she has only garnered weariness. — Paul Eldridge