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Modern Man Quotes

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Modern Man Quotes

“It is this kind of consciousness, exacerbated to an extreme, which has made inevitable the so called "death of God." Cartesian thought began with an attempt to reach God as object by starting from the thinking self. But when God becomes object, he sooner or later "dies," because God as object is ultimately unthinkable. God as object is not only a mere abstract concept, but one which contains so many internal contradictions that it becomes entirely nonnegotiable except when it is hardened into an idol that is maintained in existence by a sheer act of will. For a long time man continued to be capable of this willfulness: but now the effort has become exhausting and many Christians have realised it to be futile. Relaxing the effort, they have let go the "God-object" which their fathers and grandfathers still hoped to manipulate for their own ends. Their weariness has accounted for the element of resentment which made this a conscious "murder" of the deity. Liberated from the strain of willfully maintaining an object-God in existence, the Cartesian consciousness remains none the less imprisoned in itself. Hence the need to break out of itself and to meet "the other" in "encounter," "openness," "fellowship," "communion".”

ChristianityZenCatholicismModern ManGod Is DeadDescartesCartesianMertonSecond Vatican Council
Book:Zen and the Birds of Appetite
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“We live in an unbelieving age but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual. There is one type of modern man who recognizes spirit in himself but who fails to recognize a being outside himself whom he can adore as Creator and Lord; consequently he has become his own ultimate concern. He says with Swinburne, "Glory to man in the highest, for he is the master of things," or with Steinbeck, "In the end was the word and the word was with men." For him, man has his own natural spirit of courage and dignity and pride and must consider it a point of honor to be satisfied with this. There is another type of modern man who recognizes a divine being not himself, but who does not believe that this being can be known anagogically or defined dogmatically or received sacramentally. Spirit and matter are separated for him. Man wanders about, caught in a maze of guilt he can't identify, trying to reach a God he can't approach, a God powerless to approach him. And there is another type of modern man who can neither believe nor contain himself in unbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God.”

GodFaithGuiltHumanismDisbeliefModern Man
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
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“Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride.”

MenReasonChristModernMankindLonelinessCryPridePureIntellectualConscienceTraditionEmptyClaimsPrejudiceIntuitionVanitySatanWildernessLive ByArrogantTemptedDeprivedWisestModern ManWitheredExpanseWasteland
Book:The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
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“Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.”

MenMindOrderEvilForceInterestBehindsExistencePrinciplesEnvironmentSocietyModernUniversalRelateDependentArtificialIsolatedUrbanClosingRefusalComprehensionUnnaturalBarbariansGadgetsModern ManForces Of NatureHeating
Book:The Act of Creation
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“The ancient man approached God (or even the gods)as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the bench and God is in the dock.”

IfsMenShouldMayPersonsImportantWarEndsPovertyRolesModernReadyJudgingDiseaseApproachShould HaveImportant ThingsAncientDefenseTrialsReasonablePermitAccusedBenchesModern ManDocksAcquittal
Author:C. S. Lewis
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“Modern man may assert that he can dispense with them, and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth. But since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human understanding, and there is no mean of proving immortality), why should we bother with evidence?”

MenShouldHumansMayMeanUnderstandingOpinionModernProveEvidenceInvisibleBotherImmortalityMemories Dreams ReflectionsModern ManInsistingScientific Evidence
Book:Man and His Symbols
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“For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club.”

IfsMenChristianIssuesPsychologyModernMonthsPromiseDiscoveryScientistSalvationJewClubsDisappearSaviorSociologyPsychiatrySelectedMessiahModern Man
Author:Thomas Szasz
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“Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.”

MenChildrenSelfRunningJoyParentImaginationFantasyEnvironmentModernConditionsFineSeekingSelf RespectModern Man
Book:Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
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“The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.”

MenYearsCharacterCultureSocialResponsibilityModernThousandAuthoritySixBasesStructureLongingMiseryIsolationSurroundThousand YearsCravingMysticModern Man
Author:Wilhelm Reich
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“Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.”

MenHumansLooksMayCoursesProcessUnderstandingViewsModernMiddlePositionObjectsDevelopmentConsciousOriginalsSeekingFollowingPoint Of ViewImpressionRelativeBehaviourPlatoEvaluationModern ManCorrespondenceHuman KnowledgeDialecticsHuman PsycheCongruenceUnderstanding Nature
Author:Wolfgang Pauli
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“Beauty in this Iron Age must turn, From fluid living rainbow shapes to torn, And sootened fragments, ashes in an urn, On whose gray surface runes are traced by a Norn, Who hopes to wake the Future to arise, In Phoenix-fashion, and to shine with rays, To blast the sight of modern men whose dyes, Of selfishness and lust have stained our days...”

MenAgeTurnsModernFashionShapesSightShiningSurfaceLustAriseSelfishnessIronGrayRaysAshesRainbowTornFragmentsFluidBlastPhoenixModern ManRunes
Author:Philip Jose Farmer
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“The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. The history of religions can play an extremely important role in the crisis we are living through. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.”

MenHumansImportantPlayReligiousRolesModernAwarenessRelationDown AndCrisisSacredAwakeningAbsenceContactModern Man
Author:Mircea Eliade
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“It is useless saying that we do not accept the gods of the primitive world. In form, no; in essence, yes. The fact before us is that all ideas of gods can be traced to the earliest stages of human history.... There is an unbroken line of descent linking the gods of the most primitive peoples to those of modern man. We reject the world of the savage; but we still, in our churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, perpetuate the theories he built upon that world.”

MenWorldHumansStillsIdeasFactsFormChurchLinesAcceptingAtheismModernStageTheoryBuiltEssenceUselessTemplesRejectsPrimitiveSavagesHuman HistoryDescentUnbrokenMosquesModern ManSynagogue
Author:Chapman Cohen
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“No technological achievements can mitigate the disappointment of modern man, his loneliness, his feeling of inferiority, and his fear of war, revolution and terror. Not only has our generation lost faith in Providence but also in man himself, in his institutions and often in those who are nearest to him.”

MenWarFeelingsLostGenerationsModernLonelinessRevolutionAchievementInstitutionsTerrorDisappointmentProvidenceTechnologicalInferiorityOur GenerationModern ManLost Faith
Book:Aspects of I.B. Singer
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“None of the three great apes is considered ancestral to modern man, Homo sapiens, but they remain the only other type of extant primate with which human beings share such close physical characteristics. From them we may learn much concerning the behavior of our earliest primate prototypes, because behavior, unlike bones, teeth, or tools, does not fossilize.”

MenHumansMayDoeThreeHuman BeingsShareModernTypeBehaviorToolsBonesTeethCharacteristicsBiologyWildlifeApesHomo SapiensModern ManPrimatesPrototype
Book:Gorillas in the Mist
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“The culture and educational system of the contemporary West are based almost exclusively upon the training of the reasoning brain and, to a lesser degree, of the aesthetic emotions. Most of us have forgotten that we are not only brain and will, senses and feelings; we are also spirit. Modern man has for the most part lost touch with the truest and highest aspect of himself; and the result of this inward alienation can be seen all too plainly in his restlessness, his lack of identity and his loss of hope.”

MenFeelingsSpiritCultureLostLossResultsEmotionBrainModernIdentityDegreesHighestTrainingAspectWestForgottenEducationalSensesContemporaryReasoningAestheticInwardAlienationTruestRestlessnessEducational SystemModern ManHis Loss
Author:Kallistos Ware
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“Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief callfor a God on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons.”

IfsMenDoeIdeasMatterReasonModernJudgingEgoRemainsChiefsMaterialismDefiniteHypothesisCravingDisappointPragmaticModern ManTheism
Book:The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding
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“Today the average inhabitant of the western hemisphere knows a little of everything. He has the newspaper on his breakfast table and wireless within reach. For the evening there is the film, cards, or a meeting to complete a day spent in the office or factory where nothing that is essential has been learnt. With slight variation this picture of a low cultural average holds good over the entire range from factory-hand of clerk to manager or director. Only the personal will to culture, in whatever field and however pursued raises modern man above this level.”

KnowsMenLittlesHas BeensHandsTodayFilmCultureLevelsModernFieldsDirectorsEssentialsOfficeLowsRaisesTablesMeetingsWesternAverageNewspapersCardsEveningManagersRangeBreakfastFactoriesPursuedVariationClerksWirelessModern ManHemisphereWithin Reach
Author:Johan Huizinga
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