M Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with M. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.”
Source: The Middle Works, 1899-1924
“Modern life requires us to be more and more flexible in our attire.”
“Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.”
Source: The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
“Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less we are able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is.”
Source: The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
“Modern life seems to recede further and further away from nature, and closely connected with this fact we seem to be losing the feeling of reverence towards nature. It is probably inevitable when science and machinery, capitalism and materialism go hand in hand so far in a most remarkably successful manner. Mysticism, which is the life of religion in whatever sense we understand it, has come to be relegated altogether in the background. Without a certain amount of mysticism there is no appreciation for the feeling of reverence, and, along with it, for the spiritual significance of humility. Science and scientific technique have done a great deal for humanity; but as far as our spiritual welfare is concerned we have not made any advances over that attained by our forefathers. In fact we are suffering at present the worst kind of unrest all over the world.”
Source: The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk
“Modern life would not be possible if it were not for chemicals, nor would modern natural gas production.”
“Modern life. Where are we running? Sometimes what we want is not always where we are... Are we alone? Is the real winter inside our hearts? We are all struggling for definition in a world that resists our increase.”
“Modern life... changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“Modern literary theory sees a similarity between walking and writing that I find persuasive: words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. In The practicse of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes, 'The act of walking is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian; it is a special acting-out of the place...and it implies relations among differentiated positions.' I think this is a fancy way of saying that writing is one way of making the world our own, and that walking is another.”
“Modern literature seduces with insults, riddles, and inside stories.”
“Modern loneliness is an extraverted loneliness, in which the person is surrounded by many people and partakes of much communication but feels unrecognized and more alone and, although connected technically, isolated and even estranged emotionally.”
“MODERN LOVE is so pathetic because of people's shallowness. Clearly people don't really care about understanding the actual deeper needs of others. The word 'longing' makes them cringe because they intrinsically know it's calling them into a DEEP PLACE OF CONNECTION. They'd rather open another bag of Dorridos, I tell you.”
“Modern love is the enterprise that everyone wants to be a part of, yet there's a fifty percent divorce rate in round one and a sixty-five percent divorce rate in round two.”
“Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.”
“Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results.”
Source: Love and Living
“Modern man, brought up on Kantian idealism, regards nature as being no more than an outcome of the laws of the mind. Losing all their independence as divine works, things gravitate henceforth round human thought, whence their laws are derived. What wonder, after that, is if criticism had resulted in the virtual disappearance of all metaphysics? [...] As soon as the universe is reduced to the laws of mind, man, now become creator, has no longer any means of rising above himself. Legislator of a world to which his own mind has given birth, he is henceforth the prisoner of his own work, and he will never escape from it anymore. [...] if my thought is the condition of being, never by thought shall I be able to transcend the limits of my being and my capacity for the infinite will never be satisfied.”
“Modern man creates fancy cars while losing the sacredness of his feet and lungs.”
“Modern man develops many parasocial relationships that grow on account of his era and his soulless heart, the latter, perhaps, of greater importance. Far away is the person he sees as a friend; his emotions perpetually tied to the outcomes of those he sees as deserving of his attention, it itself of no value. The death of relationships brought on one by one's own heart, beating to the tune of someone else's life. All reality is as real as imagination, causing such illusions of relationships to mark one's life as if of sense.”
“Modern man does not love, but seeks refuge in love; does not hope, but seeks refuge in hope; does not believe, but seeks refuge in a dogma.”
Source: Escolios a Un Texto Implicito: Obra Completa
“Modern man does not understand how much his "rationalism" (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic "underworld". He has freed himself from "superstition" (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.”
“Modern man drives a mortgaged car over a bond-financed highway on credit-card gas.”
“Modern man, especially modern urban intellectual man, without a sense of history or blood soil - the words Hitler's distortion made anathema - understood poorly the seemingly inexorable cycles of human conduct. Men such as Churchill, nonintellectual but brilliant, were not cleverer than the best minds of the West. But they tended to see what was, and not what should be.”
Source: This kind of peace
“Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.”
“Modern man has both feet firmly planted in mid-air”
“Modern man has left the realm of the unknown and the mysterious, and has settled down in the realm of the functional. He is turned is back to the world of the foreboding and the exulting and has welcomed the world of boredom.”
Source: Fire from Within
“Modern man has lost any sense of God's nearness, but Christianity teaches that God reveals himself through every single thing he has ever brought into being, whether a created object or historical event.”
“Modern man has lost the option of silence.”
Source: Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader
“Modern man has lost the sense of wonder
about the unknown and he treats it as
an enemy.”
Source: Patterns of Renewal
“Modern man has no real "value" for the ocean. All he has is the most crass form of egoist, pragmatic value for it. He treats it as a "thing" in the worst possible sense, to exploit it for the "good" of man. The man who believes things are there only by chance cannot give things a real value. But for the Christian the value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it.”
“Modern man has not only thrown away Christian theology, he has thrown away the possibility of what our forefathers had as a basis for morality and law.”
Source: Escape from Reason
“Modern man has so long preached a doctrine of false tolerance; he has so long believed that right and wrong were only differences in a point of view, that now when evil works itself out in practice he is paralyzed to do anything against it.”
“Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all this and watch the people decline. Without souls, they soon die, leaving dead shells, zombie cultures, shambling aimlessly towards oblivion.”
Source: Doom Patrol, Vol. 6: Planet Love
“Modern man has too many masks to wear. We must unmask and be ourselves, sincerely, earnestly and live truly as we are,”
Source: Everyday Suchness: Buddhist Essays on Everyday Living
“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.p97.”
Source: THE ART OF LOVING
“Modern man has yielded to the harsh, the crude, the vulgar, the profane, the immoral.”
“Modern man, in so far as he is still Cartesian (he is of course going far beyond Descartes in many respects), is a subject for whom his own self-awareness as a thinking, observing, measuring and estimating "self" is absolutely primary. It is for him the one indubitable "reality," and all truth starts here. The more he is able to develop his consciousness as a subject over against objects, the more he can understand things in their relations to him and one another, the more he can manipulate these objects for his own interests, but also, at the same time, the more he tends to isolate himself in his own subjective prison, to become a detached observer cut off from everything else in a kind of impenetrable alienated and transparent bubble which contains all reality in the form of purely subjective experience. Modern consciousness then tends to create this solipsistic bubble of awareness - an ego-self imprisoned in its own consciousness, isolated and out of touch with other such selves in so far as they are all "things" rather than persons.”
Source: Zen and the Birds of Appetite
“Modern man, instead of attempting to raise himself to truth, seeks to drag truth down to his own level.”
Source: The Crisis of the Modern World
“Modern man is a hard driven nomad without any stability, not (as the Bible has it) a wanderer or a pilgrim, but a refugee-an escapist. Instead of meditation and reflection there is only speed, fear and “distraction.”
“Modern man is a hard-working human.”
“Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.”
“Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.”
Source: THE ART OF LOVING
“Modern man is an island, in a historical sense. Every society born of revolution is an island, and it is an island that floats, like a thin film on the surface of history. He is always moving, disconnected from all that came before him, and never holding still long enough to strike the roots necessary to pass something on to those who will come after.”
Source: The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought
“Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise - of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema - of which the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.”
“Modern man is battered by the fundamental forces of his own psyche.”
“Modern man is conditioned to expect instant gratification, but any success or triumph realized quickly, with only marginal effort, is necessarily shallow. Meaningful achievement takes time, hard work, persistence, patience, proper intent and self-awareness. The path to success is punctuated by failure, consolidation, and renewed effort.”
“Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.”
Source: The Denial of Death
“Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.”
“Modern man is frantically trying to earn enough to buy things he's too busy to enjoy.”
“Modern man is full of platitudes about living life to its fullest, with catchy keychain phrases and little plaques for kitchen walls. But if you've never retreated to the solitude of a dark room and listened to Beethoven's Ninth from start to finish, you know nothing. For music is a transcendental exploration of human emotion and experience, the very fabric of life in its purest form. And the Ninth our greatest musical achievement.”
“Modern man is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, and his hidden truth; he is a man who tries to invest himself”
Source: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction