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Modernity Quotes

Browse 366 quotes about Modernity.

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Modernity Quotes

“The overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you'd probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It's part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don't notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don't get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you're thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen.”

SexPleasureTechnologyTelevisionNoiseModernityStimulationHedonismSaturation
Book:A Naked Singularity
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“En réalité, j’ai l’impression que la structure fondamentale du désir se situe justement ici : il est propulsé par l’exigence de mettre à portée quelque chose qui ne l’est pas (encore). Et là se trouve peut-être la clé permettant de nous soustraire au jeu de l’accroissement sans limites auquel se livre la modernité et à son ambition de rendre tout et chacun disponible, de la priver de l’énergie de propulsion dont elle a besoin, de débrancher en quelque sorte sa « prise libineuse ». Ma thèse est que la structure fondamentale du désir humain est un désir de relation : nous voulons atteindre ou rendre atteignable quelque chose qui n’est pas « à notre disposition ». Ce quelque chose peut être, par exemple, une nouvelle guitare ou une tablette tactile, un lac ou un être aimé. Dans tous ces cas, le désir vise à entrer avec ce qui est désiré dans une relation responsive ; de placer la guitare, la personne ou le lac dans un rapport de réponse, ou d’entrer avec la tablette dans des relations responsives avec le monde. Mais dans chaque cas, je l’affirme, le désir s’éteint lorsqu’il n’y a plus rien à « découvrir » sur ou avec le vis-à-vis, si nous maîtrisons et contrôlons toutes ses propriétés, si nous en disposons totalement. Une fois de plus, nous pouvons donc aussi parler de « semi-disponibilité » : nous ne pouvons pas désirer une personne ou une guitare si nous ne savons strictement rien d’elle et si nous ne l’avons jamais vue. Dans la première dimension, l’objet du désir doit donc être au moins partiellement et temporairement disponible, sans quoi il renvoie à une « nostalgie sans nom », dans laquelle l’objet du désir est le désir lui-même. La disposition complète, dans la totalité des quatre dimensions, provoque en revanche l’extinction du désir : le jeu perd son objet, la musique son attrait, l’amour son ardeur. L’indisponibilité complète est dépourvue de sens au regard du désir, mais la disponibilité totale est sans attrait. Cela signifie qu’une relation réussie au monde vise à l’atteignabilité, pas à la disponibilité. Il faut qu’un vis-à-vis soit atteignable sous une forme quelconque, il doit être possible de nouer avec lui un rapport de réponse qui ne soit pas erratique, c’est-à-dire complètement fortuit, mais qui ne soit pas non plus entièrement contrôlable, et qui, à partir de cette structure même, enclenche l’interaction entre l’interpellation, l’efficacité personnelle et la transformation, permettant ainsi l’expérience de la vitalité.”

DesireModernityResonanceCritical TheoryUncontrollability
Book:Unverfügbarkeit
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“Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do.”

LifePhilosophyWisdomCultureFeminismModernityWomen S LiberationWestern CivilizationPopular CulturePostmodernismMaleness
Author:Tiffany Madison
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“Modern culture rewards surface-level uniqueness, such as appearance, career path, or social media presence, but punishes true divergence in worldview, thought, or behavior. What people often refer to as "being different" is usually just someone walking down the exact same path as everyone else, but with their steps slightly bent and curved rather than being direct and usual like others. So, although they appear as "individuals" from the outside, inside, they are actually a herd of the same kind of sheep blindly following each other. This is conformity within “individuality.” And this disguise is the thing that gives the tool for the Westerners to call themselves "freedom fighters.”

FreedomSlaveryIndividualityConformityIndividualismModernityDifferenceHerd MentalityArtificialityDeviance
Author:Sov8840
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“My china boy seemed to embody the way no story reaches us without having its heels chipped off or its face scratched away. And how lacunae and gaps are the constant companions of survival, its hidden engine, fueling its acceleration. How only trauma makes individuals — singly and unambiguously us — from the mass product. And yes, finally, the way in which I am the little boy, the product of mass manufacturing and also of the collective catastrophe of the last century, the survivor and unwitting beneficiary, here by some miracle.”

WarIndividualityTraumaWorld War IiHolocaustWorld War IModernity
Book:In Memory of Memory
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“In a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual’s reason finds in these institutions, only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own. Freedom of choice, of course, is often equally called ‘freedom’; but freedom of choice is only non-rational freedom, choice and self-determination issuing not from the rationality of the will but from fortuitous impulses and their dependence on sense and the external world.”

FreedomInstitutionsIndividualityRationalityModernityLawsHegelThe State
Book:Lecciones de Estetica
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“Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically "modern" conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity.”

ArtModernUnityIndividualityMiddle AgesModernityObjectivityRenaissanceAntiquitySubjectivityIndividuationClassical
Book:Meaning in the Visual Arts
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“Writing a decade later, in the essay 'Experience and Poverty' of 1933, Benjamin, unsurprisingly, saw the phenomenon differently: 'A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. With this tremendous development of technology, a completely new poverty has descended on humankind. And the reverse side of this poverty is the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely - ideas that have come with the revival of astrology and the wisdom of yoga, Christian Science and chiromancy, vegetarianism and gnosis, scholasticism and spiritualism. For this is not a genuine revival but a galvanization.' If Kracauer maintains the idealist notion that 'concrete communal forms' might arise as the reflection of ideas emanating from a generalized national spirit, Benjamin suggests that the unceasing profusion of this 'wealth of ideas' would actually 'swamp' people - and that a new experiential poverty or constructive divestiture is actually the only appropriate response to the times.”

IdeasWealthPovertyTechnologyModernityDivestiture
Book:Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
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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?”

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Author:Amit Kalantri
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“A scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterizes the modern era. Véronique had known too many discothèques, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage. Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two. In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag. And so one leads, obviously, a slag’s life; in ageing one becomes less seductive, and on that account bitter. One is jealous of the young, and so one hates them. Condemned to remain unavowable, this hatred festers and becomes increasingly fervent; then it dies down and fades away, just as everything fades away. All that remains is resentment and disgust, sickness and the anticipation of death.”

LoveWomenSocietyModernityCasual Sex
Book:Whatever
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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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“W bezlitośnie powikłanym świecie praca, podobnie jak całe ludzkie życie, rozpada się na szereg zamkniętych epizodów, a szanse na wykonanie jej zgodnie z założonym planem są, podobnie jak w przypadku innych ludzkich działań, nikłe lub wręcz nierealne. Praca przemieściła się ze świata ładotwórstwa i kontrolowanej przyszłości na obszar gry. Działania pracujących osób przypominają coraz bardziej strategię graczy, którzy stawiają sobie umiarkowanie odległe cele i wybiegają myślą nie dalej niż jeden lub dwa posunięcia do przodu.”

WorkModernity
Book:Liquid Modernity
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“Show business and politics, being run by practical, cigar-smoking businessmen, manufacture personalities on an assembly line. Baseball, fighting for its life, has been stifling them as fast as they appear. What makes it so sad is that the athlete has a role in our society that reaches even beyond showmanship. The athlete is one of the last symbols of that superfluity of our society, the physical man. The average man finds that although the instincts of his primitive forebears may beat a tomtom in his blood, his own daily conflict has been reduced to the drive downtown, the paper work in the office, the return trip. The conflict is undefined, the enemy is indistinct, the battle remains permanently unsettled. He doesn't really know whether he has won or lost; there is only the vague feeling that he is somehow losing.”

SportsWorkExerciseMasculinityModernityAthleticsPhysicalityPersonalitiesContentedness
Book:The Hustler's Handbook
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“When I listen to that distant call [of the cuckoo], I become freshly aware of a sense of oneness with everything that exists. At such moments I come to see that everything is flowing together like a timeless river, and I become thoroughly convinced of this reality. The invisible becomes clearer than the visible, and the eternal becomes closer than the present. ,,, One of the tragedies of modernity is that artificial sounds are making it impossible to hear the sounds of eternity. They are cutting off the sounds that come from within the deepest part of us.”

TimeNatureBuddhismEternityZenModernityRevelationZen BuddhismSounds Of Life
Book:The Sound of Water, The Sound of Wind: And Other Early Works by a Korean Monk
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“In the last two centuries mankind has advanced far on the road to toleration, one of the first of the civic virtues; but now an intolerant spirit is abroad which claims for this or that dogma the status of final truth, and would compel its acceptance by fire and sword.”

TruthReligionFearDemocracyProgressThoughtDogmaModernityAuthoritarianismRegression
Book:The Interpreter's House - The Chancellor's Installation Address Delivered Before the University of Edinburgh, July 20th 1938
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“...Originally everything about a Greek or Christian building meant something, and in reference to a higher order of things. This atmosphere of inexhaustible meaningfulness hung about the building like a magic veil. Beauty entered the system only secondarily, impairing the basic feeling of uncanny sublimity, of sanctification by magic or the gods' nearness. At the most, beauty tempered the dread - but this dread was the prerequisite everywhere. What does the beauty of a building mean to us now? The same as the beautiful face of a mindless woman: something masklike.”

GodChristianReligionValuesMagicArchitectureGreekModernityBuildings
Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the “avant-garde” - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored.”

ArtModernityDecline Of Civilization
Book:Myth and Reality
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“What modern art has to do in the service of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit. And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it in art would have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the moral order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare: it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom? Certainly, in Goethe's romances, and even more in the romances of Victor Hugo, there are high examples of modern art dealing thus with modern life, regarding that life as the modern mind must regard it, yet reflecting upon blitheness and repose. Natural laws we shall never modify, embarrass us as they may; but there is still something in the nobler or less noble attitude with which we watch their fatal combinations. In those romances of Goethe and Victor Hugo, in some excellent work done after them, this entanglement, this network of law, becomes the tragic situation, in which certain groups of noble men and women work out for themselves a supreme Denouement. Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of circumstance which endows one at the end with those great experiences?”

ArtCultureModernity
Book:The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
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“Beauty is what lies beyond usefulness. Beauty inspires loyalty and gives meaning to mere usefulness. We need useful things, but we love beautiful things. A building which is merely functional will not last, for people will not love it. They will get bored with it. The average football stadium now costs a billion dollars to build and lasts just thirty years, after which it appears dated, silly, and unfashionable. The Chartres Cathedral, on the other hand, is more beautiful than any sports complex on earth and it has been functional for more than 800 years. Beautiful things last because when they begin to fall apart, we tend to them, revive and restore them; however, when purely functional things fall apart, we tire of them and replace them.”

ArtBeautyArchitectureConservatismModernityCathedralsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“With an evermore increase of industrialisation machine stops being merely a tool, develops a life of its own and imposes its rhythm onto human. Operating it he moves mechanically, becomes part of the machine.”

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Book:Fritz Lang: Filmbilder Vorbilder
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“The idea that human nature is perfectible, that under which modernity and the technological project is founded, is completely unbelievable now. Everyone in the sciences now agrees that human nature is fundamentally flawed and animalistic. Even all the socialists and the scientists at this point agree that half of human nature is genetic. This is indirect opposition even to what people believed 10 years ago, that all humans are equal, blank slates who are motivated by social engineering.”

PsychologySocietyHuman NatureSociologyModernity
Author:Whatifalthist
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“I admit that all humanists — as humanists — have been individualists. As humanists, they have had nothing to offer to the mob. But they have usually left a place, not only for the mob, but (what is more important) for the mob part of the mind in themselves. Mr. Babbitt is too rigorous and conscientious a Protestant to do that: hence there seems to be a gap between his own individualism (and indeed intellectualism, beyond a certain point, must be individualistic) and his genuine desire to offer something which will be useful to the American nation primarily and to civilization itself. But the historical humanist, as I understand him, halts at a certain point and admits that the reason will go no farther, and that it cannot feed on honey and locusts. Humanism is either an alternative to religion, or is ancillary to it. To my mind, it always flourishes most when religion has been strong; and if you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it destroyed. Any religion, of course, is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion. It is only renewed and refreshed by an awakening of feeling and fresh devotion, or by the critical reason. The latter may be the part of the humanist. But if so, then the function of humanism, though necessary, is secondary. You cannot make humanism itself into a religion.”

ChristianityHumanismModernityThe West
Book:For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays Ancient & Modern
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“This agitation is becoming so great that the higher culture can no longer allow its fruits to ripen; it is as if the seasons were following to quickly from one another. From lack of rest, our civilization is ending in a new barbarism. Never have the active, which is to say the restless, people been prized more. Therefore, one of the necessary correctives that must be applied to the character of humanity is a massive strengthening of the contemplative element.”

HumanityActivityBusyCalmLeisureModernityFree TimeMeditative
Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“Where is the notion of a real hierarchy still to be found in the modern world? Nothing and nobody is any longer in the right place; men no longer recognize any effective authority in the spiritual order or any legitimate power in the temporal; the 'profane' presume to discuss what is sacred, and to contest its character and even its existence; the inferior judges the superior, ignorance sets bounds to wisdom, error prevails over truth, the human is substituted for the Divine, earth has priority over Heaven, the individual sets the measure for all things and claims to dictate to the universe laws drawn entirely from his own relative and fallible reason. 'Woe unto you, ye blind guides,' the Gospel says; and indeed everywhere today one sees nothing but blind leaders of the blind, who, unless restrained by some timely check, will inevitably lead them into the abyss, there to perish with them.”

WisdomSpiritualAuthoritySacredModernity
Book:The Crisis of the Modern World
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“The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages. As John Cheever said, the main emotion of the adult Northeastern American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment. Work is disappointing. In spite of all the talk about making work more creative and self-fulfilling, most people hate their jobs, and with good reason. Most work in modern technological societies is intolerably dull and repetitive. Marriage and family life are disappointing. Even among defenders of traditional family values, e.g., Christians and Jews, a certain dreariness must be inferred, if only from the average time of TV viewing. Dreary as TV is, it is evidently not as dreary as Mom talking to Dad or the kids talking to either. School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of, school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone's bridge in Physics. Politics is disappointing. Most young people turn their backs on politics, not because of the lack of excitement of politics as it is practiced, but because of the shallowness, venality, and image-making as these are perceived through the media--one of the technology's greatest achievements. The churches are disappointing, even for most believers. If Christ brings us new life, it is all the more remarkable that the church, the bearer of this good news, should be among the most dispirited institutions of the age. The alternatives to the institutional churches are even more grossly disappointing, from TV evangelists with their blown-dry hairdos to California cults led by prosperous gurus ignored in India but embraced in La Jolla. Social life is disappointing. The very franticness of attempts to reestablish community and festival, by partying, by groups, by club, by touristy Mardi Gras, is the best evidence of the loss of true community and festival and of the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection. But there remains the one unquestioned benefit of science: the longer and healthier life made possible by modern medicine, the shorter work-hours made possible by technology, hence what is perceived as the one certain reward of dreary life of home and the marketplace: recreation. Recreation and good physical health appear to be the only ambivalent benefits of the technological revolution.”

TechnologySocietyDisappointmentModernityRecreationThe SelfWorld Weariness
Book:Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
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“Those who might be tempted to give way to despair should realize that nothing accomplished in this order can ever be lost, that confusion, error and darkness can win the day only apparently and in a purely ephemeral way, that all partial and transitory disequilibrium must perforce contribute towards the greater equilibrium of the whole, and that nothing can ultimately prevail against the power of truth.”

WorldInspirationTruthPurposeReligionOrderSpiritualityHopeGoalBalanceDespairTraditionModernity
Book:The Crisis of the Modern World
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“The people's need to share has turned into a massive disease. It has taken them to the most private meaningless part of their lives. In such circumstance, values become redefined and what has been worthless in the past, has become the core value of the new age. The disaster starts where the essence of the discourse changes. The modern age, with all its technological advances, has taken human to the fast fall. We are going down faster than being trapped into a mire. The transition of the discourse has also given us a great gift, senselessness. Therefore, we have transitioned into piles of senseless machines, drained of human essentiality and drowning into a giant mire. The sad part is, due to the lack of true sense, we don't even feel it. Our only safety guard, which is entirely absurd and phantasmagoric, comes from following the majority of the world's population. As long as we feel belonged to preponderancy, our nonsense will absolutely make sense.”

WorldLifeHumanityTechnologyShareEssenceValueDrowningModernitySenseModern AgeSenselessnessMire
Author:Kambiz Shabankare
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“All he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or stenches. In six months, he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream intestines through which he must violently force his way each night.”

StressCityModernityCivizilization
Book:The Illustrated Man
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“From the advertisement, his eyes moved up the skywalk, the zigzagging metal bridge that connected various locations in the neighborhood to the Banda train station. Behind the metal grid, men moved back and forth. Tommy Sir's eyes grew tired. He felt that up there, on that seemingly never-ending bridge, shadowy figures were moving toward obscure destinations, possibly only to return to their point of origin, like in an architectural sketch of infinity by M.C. Escher. Hell is a choice, made daily and by millions, and breathing slowly and watching this aerial cage, Tommy Sir saw Mumbai, minute by minute, unbecome and become hell.”

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Author:Aravind Adiga
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“People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes." "You speak in riddles, aged progenitor." "The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or p-p-play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.”

LifeSelfSpiritualReligionChangeEternalCatholicCatholicismMonkModernityThingsNewnessBenedictine
Book:Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
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“On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world. The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world.”

NatureTechnologyLonelinessDistanceIsolationWildernessAbstractionModernityConnectednessThe Wild
Book:The Wild Places
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