Moderns Quotes & Sayings

Epistemology is still a central issue in philosophy, and we moderns are particularly vexed with the question of how we can come to know anything outside what we already know, that is, how we can climb out of our own culture's basic assumptions, and how we can hope to see beyond our brains' basic formation. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder those poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn't allow them to take things easily, didn't allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty - they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable? — Aldous Huxley

The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else. — G.K. Chesterton

I start off with the obvious, that it makes no sense either to believe or to disbelieve in God until a substantial and intelligent definition or concept should be offered. Belief or disbelief is a secondary consideration, contingent on the intelligibility and cogency of the premise; the primal unintelligence or irrationality of moderns is revealed by their eagerness to leap to a conclusion without ever being curious what the hell the original premise was. — Kenny Smith

The more I view the independence of the press in its principal effects, the more I convince myself that among the moderns the independence of the press is the capital and so to speak the constitutive element of freedom. — Alexis De Tocqueville

To many moderns, [love] is something that is only a part of us rather than something of which we are a part. — Peter Kreeft

People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral. — Heinrich Heine

Someone has said that to plagiarise from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners. — Nicolas Chamfort

Grace has not been well understood by the post-modern church let alone applied as post-moderns in our lives as a reality that Christ secured for us."

~R. Alan Woods [2012] — R. Alan Woods

That love, which is the highest joy, which is divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you children of reflection. It works only evil in you. As soon as you wish to be natural, you becomecommon. To you nature seems something hostile; you have made devils out of the smiling gods of Greece, and out of me a demon. You can only exorcise and curse me, or slay yourselves in bacchantic madness before my altar. And if ever one of you has had the courage to kiss my red mouth, he makes a barefoot pilgrimage to Rome in penitential robes and expects flowers to grow from his withered staff, while under my feet roses, violets, and myrtles spring up every hour, but their fragrance does not agree with you. Stay among your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us pagans remain under the debris, beneath the lava; do not disinter us. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners. — Alexis De Tocqueville

What we moderns call "addictions" God calls "idols," and all of God's good gifts are meant to raise our eyes in thanksgiving to our benevolent heavenly Father, not to fix our eyes on the gifts themselves. — Michael S. Horton

It is the cruelest of all ironies that moderns imagine themselves to be (abstractly understood) "individuals," because in actuality moderns are "types," abstracted and self-abstractive victims of a process of stereotyping that afflicts even would-be rebels and anarchists. — Kenny Smith

It were indeed to be wish'd that our art had been less ingenious, in contriving means destructive to mankind; we mean those instruments of war, which were unknown to the ancients, and have made such havoc among the moderns. But as men have always been bent on seeking each other's destruction by continual wars; and as force, when brought against us, can only be repelled by force; the chief support of war, must, after money, be now sought in chemistry. — Hermann Boerhaave

Or powerful objects, such as statues, amulets, monuments, certain models of cars. But they prefer
human form. You see gods have great power, but only humans have creativity, the power to change
history rather than simply repeat it. Humans can ... how do you moderns say it ... think outside the cup."
"The box," I suggested. — Rick Riordan

At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year. — W. H. Auden

'It's this accursed Science,' I cried. 'It's the very Devil. The mediaeval priests and persecutors were right, and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it-and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way.' — George Herbert

The moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack and far less easy to conquer than the mere fact of servitude: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color. — Alexis De Tocqueville

You see gods have great power, but only humans have creativity, the power to change history rather than simply repeat it. Humans can ... how do you moderns say it ... think outside the cup. — Rick Riordan

If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them
structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible. — Amos Bronson Alcott

The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience. — Alfred North Whitehead

Most universities are no longer temples of knowledge, but of power, and true moderns worship there. — Dean Koontz

The life of famous men was more glorious in antiquity; the life of obscure men is happier with the moderns. — Madame De Stael

I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should." And to you moderns, who perhaps do not believe as I do, I will say, "In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny. — Emmuska Orczy

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived! — Wallace Stegner

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself. — Allan Bloom

Sex has become one of the most discussed subjects of modern times. The Victorians pretended it did not exist; the moderns pretend nothing else exists. — Fulton J. Sheen

Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot — Ken Wilber

If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history. — A.S. Byatt

From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

William Blake cursed the flesh for a clod,
Yet of some of his sayings we Moderns have heard tell:
'The nakedness of woman is the work of God',
Or that title
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. — Allen Tate

if one's religion is to mean anything, if it is to last, it has to stand outside of time and place. Its truths have to be transcendent. And though we moderns have to find a way to make the tradition livable in our own situations, we must never forget that we don't judge the religion; the religion judges us. To be blunt, a god that is no bigger than our own desires is not God at all, but a divinized rationalization for self-worship. — Rod Dreher

How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about our world! And it is all so novel, too. The cosmology underlying our mental processes is but three centuries old a mere infant in the history of thought and yet we cling to it with the same embarrassed zeal with which a young father fondles his new-born baby. Like him, we are ignorant enough of its precise nature ; like him, we nevertheless take it piously to be ours and allow it a subtly pervasive and unhindered control over our
thinking. — E. A. Burtt

The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene
sensuousness of the Greeks
pleasure without pain. I do not believe
in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the
moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse
than a heretic, I am a pagan. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

To us post-moderns, empathy is a stranger in a strange land".

~R. Alan Woods [2012] — R. Alan Woods

"The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history." Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself ... Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer ... A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The moderns do not realize modernity. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry. — Michael Pollan

The truth is that the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns is permanent. It began with Zinjanthropus (one million seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago) and will end only with humanity-- or perhaps the mutants who succeed us will take up the cause. — Francois Le Lionnais

It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while. — Albert Einstein

In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerner's access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. — Wm. Paul Young

The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To the haranguers of the populace among the ancients, succeed among the moderns your writers of political pamphlets and news-papers, and your coffee-house talkers. — Benjamin Franklin

The finest and most beautiful ideas on morals and manners have been swept away before our times, and nothing is left for us but to glean after the ancients and the ablest amongst the moderns. — Jean De La Bruyere

The Greek word pseudepigrapha is a Greek word meaning 'falsely superscribed,' or what we moderns might call writing under a pen name. The classification, 'OT Pseudepigrapha,' is a label that scholars have given to these writings. — Craig A. Evans

It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood. — Bernard DeVoto

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern. — Margery Allingham

We moderns do not believe in demigods, but our smallest hero we expect to feel and act as a demigod. — Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

In a post-modern culture we need an apologetic that is felt and seen because if post-moderns are not feeling it, they are not believing it. — Ravi Zacharias

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family. — G.K. Chesterton

One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space. — Robert Frost

The men of the past had convictions, while we moderns have only opinions. — Heinrich Heine

It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality ... But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it. — G.K. Chesterton

In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary ... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology. — Henry David Thoreau

It must be granted that many aspects of the intellectual life of that era showed energy and grandeur. We moderns explain its concomitant uncertainty and falseness as a symptom of the horror which seized men when at the end of an era of apparent victory and success they found themselves suddenly confronting a void: great material scarcity, a period of political and military crises, and an accelerating distrust of the intellect itself, of its own virtue and dignity and even of its own existence. Yet that very period, filled though it was with premonitions of doom, was marked by some very fine intellectual achievements, — Hermann Hesse

In an age in which greed and lust stalk the land like some Biblical plague, it is easy to view sex as just one more thing to be had. It is the mythos of moderns. — Jennifer Stone

But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This "goal-driven" attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding. — Mortimer J. Adler

Not that the moderns are born with more wit than their predecessors, but, finding the world better furnished at their coming into it, they have more leisure for new thoughts, more light to direct them, and more hints to work upon. — Jeremy Collier

Long ago it took a Copernicus to tell a provincial world that this planet was not the center of the universe. Some selfish moderns need a Copernican reminder that they are not the center of the universe either! — Neal A. Maxwell

The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies. — Jean-Baptiste Say

It has been observed that a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant will see farther than the giant himself; and the moderns, standing as they do on the vantage ground of former discoveries and uniting all the fruits of the experience of their forefathers, with their own actual observation, may be admitted to enjoy a more enlarged and comprehensive view of things than the ancients themselves. — Charles Caleb Colton

That's why moderns have to have hobbies. They can't find satisfaction in their money-earning work, so many seek creative satisfaction in model planes and trains. — Douglas Wilson

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition. — Charles Caleb Colton

Elegant and lucid ... a pitch-perfect clarion call, issued not with preachy hubris but from a deep place of humility, for awakening to the greatest rewards of living ... The Road to Character is an essential read in its entirety-Anne Lamott with a harder edge of moral philosophy, Seneca with a softer edge of spiritual sensitivity, E. F. Schumacher for perplexed moderns. — Maria Popova

The moderns cannot reach their beauties, but can avoid their imperfections. — Joseph Addison

The volumes of antiquity, like medals, may very well serve to amuse the curious, but the works of the moderns, like the current coin of a kingdom, are much better for immediate use. — Oliver Goldsmith

Neither ancients nor moderns who were good men have done such ,a deed that, after promising ,a daughter to one man, they have her to another, Nor, indeed, have we heard, even in former creations, of such ,a thing as the covert sale of a daughter for a fixed price, called a nuptial fee. — Guru Nanak

and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers."44 Where primitives identify themselves with the world itself, moderns identify themselves with the part of them that controls the world: the ego. — C. G. Jung

The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest. — Benjamin Franklin

But we moderns are impatient and destructive. — John Crowe Ransom

From the 5th grade through the 4th year of college, our young people are being indoctrinated with a Marxist philosophy and I am fearful of the harvest. The younger generation is further to the left than most adults realize. The old concepts of our Founding Fathers are scoffed and jeered at by young moderns whose goals appear to be the destruction of integrity and virtue, and the glorification of pleasure, thrills, and self-indulgence. — Ezra Taft Benson

The crucial importance of human expectations has far-reaching implications for understanding the history of happiness. If happiness depended only on objective conditions such as wealth, health and social relations, it would have been relatively easy to investigate its history. The finding that it depends on subjective expectations makes the task of historians far harder. We moderns have an arsenal of tranquillisers and painkillers at our disposal, but our expectations of ease and pleasure, and our intolerance of inconvenience and discomfort, have increased to such an extent that we may well suffer from pain more than our ancestors ever did. — Yuval Noah Harari

The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist. — Jacques Barzun

It is a matter worthy of observation, that the more a country is peopled, the smaller their armies are. In military numbers, the ancients far exceeded the moderns: and the reason is evident, for trade being the consequence of population, men become too much absorbed thereby to attend to any thing else. Commerce diminishes the spirit, both of patriotism and military defence. And history sufficiently informs us, that the bravest achievements were always accomplished in the non age of a nation. — Thomas Paine

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake. — Gustave Courbet

Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry; judge them all by their merits, but not by their age — Lord Chesterfield

I am not averse to generalizing the notion of "modern" to designate a certain way of life, rather than making it purely a synonym of 'contemporary'. There are moments and places in history to which 'we moderns' could return without too greatly disturbing the harmony of those times, without seeming objects infinitely curious and conspicuous ... creatures shocking, dissonant, and unassailable. — Paul Valery

The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint
or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

We are like dwarfs [the moderns] sitting on the shoulders of giants [the ancients]. Our glance can thus take in more things and reach farther than theirs. It is not because our sight is sharper nor our height greater than theirs; it is that we are carried and elevated by the high stature of the giants. — Bernard Of Chartres

Moderns consider themselves wholly rational, unemotional, scientific, and atheistic. Where earlier humanity had realized its unconscious through religion, moderns dismiss both religion and the unconscious as prescientific delusions. Instead, moderns proudly identify themselves with their ego and thereby boast of their omnipotence: nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they — C. G. Jung

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns. — William Penn