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Modernism Quotes

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Modernism Quotes

“The sense of modernism is often seen in the determination of each of the arts to come as close as possible to its own particular nature, its essence. For instance, lyric poetry rejected anything rhetorical, didactic, embellishing, so as to set flowing the pure fount of poetic fantasy. Painting renounced its documentary, mimetic function, whatever might be expressed by some other medium (for instance, photography). And the novel? It too refuses to exist as illustration of a historical era, as description of society, as defense of an ideology, and instead puts itself exclusively at the service of “what only the novel can say.”

ArtPoetryNovelPaintingModernismEssential
Book:The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
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“On the first day of a college you will worry about how will you do inside the college? and at the last day of a college you will wonder what will you do outside the college?”

TruthSchoolWonderWorryModernInformationStudentsCollegeInternetDataGoogleGraduationTeenAmit KalantriModernityAmit Kalantri QuotesModernismSocial NetworkingInformation TechnologySocial NetworkSearchItInsideOutsideSearch EngineCollege DaysInternet Quotes21st Century QuotesComputer QuotesGoogle QuotesSearch EnginesModern QuotesModern QuotationsTeen AgeColllege Students
Author:Amit Kalantri
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“But do you imagine there’s a certain type of person in the world who conforms to the idea of a ‘bad person'? You’ll never find someone who fits that mold neatly, you know. On the whole, all people are good, or at least they’re normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch. That’s why you have to be careful.”

SelfEvilIndividualFreedomEthicsJapanModernismContingencyMeijiAntebellumFin De SiecleThe Crunch
Book:Kokoro
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“I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal. College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain. Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed—maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it.”

EvilNovelPsychologyJapanIntrospectionGood IntentionsModernismExistential Crisis
Book:South of the Border, West of the Sun
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“I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.”

EvilNovelPsychologyIntrospectionGood IntentionsModernism
Book:South of the Border, West of the Sun
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“The modern world has forgotten the necessity of encouraging men to be better. They speak of sick men or healthy men, of interesting people or uninteresting people; they never, or seldom, indicate that there is and must be an interior and spiritual improvement in man before any of the glowing coals of humanity can be reached. They have cultivated everything but the goodness of man. The result of such shallowness is everywhere apparent.”

HumanitySinVirtueGoodnessHolinessSpiritual GrowthModernityModernismSpiritual WarfareVirtues And Vices
Book:How to Improve Your Personality by Reading
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“The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond.”

BibleModernismSavagery
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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“[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.”

ArtModelsTraditionMeaningModernismFallacyAssumptionsAvant GardeArt HistoryTrope
Book:The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context
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“DYSTOPIA Dark, early streets and high walls of empty houses a lonesome bird singing a hollow duet with its own echo - autumn feels like spring once you have lost everything and stand with nothing to hold onto at winter's edge - walkways glooming in buzzing orange neon light imitating fallen leaves, making the city's concrete jungle a forest - soon November is here, crawling along the pavement and dulling the grey of the ruins they call buildings - sudden flickering accompanied by loud buzzing: the lights went out while winter's edge cuts violently through the streets & building cracks - the bird stopped singing.”

LoveArtPoetryLiteraturePoemAestheticsModernismDark AcademiaLight Academia
Author:Laura Chouette
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“You remember the 'distinguished' poem that was quoted in the copy you lent to me? "They ordered bacon And eggs at seven. At eight o'clock, There was nobody down. Only the coffeepot Stood on the table." "Yes, but what possible ..." "Do you also remember what your 'distinguished' weekly said about it? 'The old-fashioned reader who would dismiss as insignificant this new and vital work (a striking example of the sharp-edged imagisme with which the more adventurous of our younger writers are experimenting today)'—you see, Basil, I have it by heart, words, tone, cadence and all—'forgets that every object, even the coffeepot on the table, has a perimeter which not only encloses that object, but also subtends a physical and metaphysical otherness that includes the whole of the rest of the universe. Such work, therefore, is more truly significant of ultimate reality than all the pantings after God of the Victorians.' ... you were squashing a perfectly genuine love of simple and true things in a perfectly genuine little woman, and that the words you borrowed for the purpose were muddle-headed and insincere drivel. ... They are not literary grounds. They are human grounds. Miss Bird, as I told you, is unlike your 'distinguished' anonymities in having a few quite genuine beliefs; and you used the cheap phrases of a pseudo-metaphysical charlatan, in a precious literary weekly, to snub her. I saw the hurt look on her face long after you had wiped your boots on her perfectly sincere love of certain perfectly true and simple things. ... I don't go to church to hear a high-brow Anglican curate quoting a Scandinavian lunatic, any more than I go to my hair-dresser's to hear a Christy minstrel reciting the Apostles' Creed. I know that it's all very noble and distinguished and broad-minded and generally newspaperish. You might have been brought up in a seminary for young ladies of fashion. ... He didn't know whether he was modern or antique. In either case, it appeared he was a fraud.”

ArtPoetryLiteratureModernism
Book:The Sun Cure
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“We, that is, the traditionalists like myself, use the term ‘‘modernism’’ not in a vague way as characterizing just things that happen to be around today, but as a particular way of looking at the world, a worldview that began in the Renaissance in the West with such components as Renaissance humanism, rationalism, et cetera. As I have mentioned already, modernism rejects the primacy of absolute and ultimate truth transcending the human order and descend- ing upon the human realm from the Divine Order. It places man himself at the center of the stage as ‘‘the absolute.’’ In a sense it absolutizes the human being in his or her earthly reality. Usually it does not come out and say so explicitly, but that is what it really means; that is, it takes the absolute away from God and puts it on the human plane, and therefore makes human reason, human perceptions, human interests the criteria of reality, of knowledge, of the truth, of the goal of human life. Therefore, as a consequence it substitutes the significance of the temporal and the transient for the abiding and the eternal.”

HumanWestHumanismAbsoluteModernismRationalismUltimate TruthDevine OrderWorlviews
Book:در جست‌وجوی امر قدسی
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“I long to get away, sometimes, from my own generation. I don't care whether it's into the past, or into the future, so long as it's away from the patter into simple realities again. I hate being a slave to my own age. ... We are so afraid of sentimentality that we're losing the power of human feeling. Our writers today understand all the brutalities and cynicisms; but how many of them understand the simple human affections that hold decent human beings together and make the world worth living in?”

HumanismLiberalismModernismConventionalityConformismSentimentalism
Book:The Sun Cure
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“These ideas fit the experience of these Japanese women who often talked about searching for or trying to develop "self" (jibun). Cultivating or polishing self by doing tea ceremony or being a good mother, for example, had a good connotation for the Japanese because it meant that you were trying to go beyond your narrow self and connect self with the larger world beyond social norms. But developing self in the new way these women used it meant to develop self according to just what you want to do or in a way that enhances your own possibilities in the world. Would others see choosing a life for self as selfish? These women had to maintain some ambiguity because they were wandering into dangerous territory when they wanted to travel just to enjoy themselves, or keep working and not marry. In a society that honored the cultivation of a larger self, would they themselves someday suffer for having chosen the self-centered way?”

SelfWesternSelf RealizationJapanIndividualismSelf CenteredSense Of SelfModernismCollectivismSelf ActualizationEast Vs WestJibunLarger Self
Book:Dilemmas of Adulthood: Japanese Women and the Nuances of Long-Term Resistance
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“The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I’m trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt. I prefer to put up with my present state of loneliness rather than suffer more loneliness later. We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours.”

SelfIndividualLonelinessEgoShadowBetrayalPsychologicalExistentialismJapanModernismDelayed GratificationMeiji
Book:Kokoro
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“ঐ নিয়ন্তা হাতটির ইশারায় বসেছি তখন সে-তটে মৎস্য-শিকারে রত, পশ্চাতে বিরান তেপান্তর আমার জমি কি নেব না গুছিয়ে আমি অন্ততঃ? লন্ডন ব্রিজ ভেঙে প’ড়ে যায় ভেঙে প’ড়ে যায় ভেঙে প’ড়ে যায় সে সেই অনলে লুকাল তাদের পুড়ে যা করবে শুদ্ধ অতঃপর কবহুঁ ভইব দোয়েল-সমান—দোয়েল দোয়েল বোনটি ভাঙা কেল­ায় আকিতেইনের রাজার কুমার কাঁদে প্রলয় আমার ঠেকিয়েছি এই খোলামকুচির বাঁধে তথাস্তু, হবে ব্যবস্থা তব। খেপেছে হিয়েরোনিমো পুনরায়। দত্ত। দয়ধ্বম্। দাম্যত। শান্তিঃ শান্তিঃ শান্তিঃ”

LoveLifePoetryFaithLonelinessModernism
Book:The Masterpieces of World Literature: 150 Books You Should Read Before You Die: Romeo and Juliet, Emma, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Tom Sawyer, Faust, Notre Dame de Paris, Dubliners, Odyssey
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“In "A Stolen Life," Dugard’s ability to think through questions of suffering, love, hope, and justice is indistinguishable from that of people her age who have lived "normally,” immersed in the world of blockbuster films, disposable fashion, popular music, easy virtue, virtue signaling, screen addiction, trendy political causes, and banal propaganda. The further I got into "A Stolen Life," the more I realized Dugard sounded just like the young women (and men) whose work I read in college writing workshops. My conclusion is both horrifying and offensive: for all the good our freedom is doing us we might as well have been locked up in a dungeon with demoniacs. The effects of living freely in the Modern world are not easily distinguishable from the effects of living in captivity with a psychopath.”

BeautyTraditionModernityModernismGood TasteBanality
Author:Joshua Gibbs
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“The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?” But it isn’t silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.”

ObsessionModernismPreoccupationRationalizationMcdonaldization
Author:John Steinbeck
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“Reflectorama by Stewart Stafford City buildings screaming down, Memories staggering anywhere, My childhood self calls out, But I must not go back there. Conjoined twins amputated, The pathway home lies cracked, Tsunamis smashed our thin bridge, Egregious horse, blindly backed. Forced into immovable objections, Monoliths in mutual self-defeat, Torched your bed, now burn in it, As I hotfoot it down the street. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

PoetryGriefIdentityMental HealthTraumaModernismEscapismSurrealismFragmentationUrban Poetry
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.”

ExistenceSolitudeMeaningIsolationModernismSubjectivityMeaninglessnessEnnuiPostwarCollapse Of Meaning
Book:The Spider's House
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