Quotes about Modern

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.

Beat doesn't mean tired or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of goals: the vibrations of sincerity.

It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice.

No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

The truth is that any good modern rifle is good enough. The determining factor is the man behind the gun.

Science gave me a cosmic religious feeling, and I would get the same feeling when I was dragged to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.

I tell you, monsieur, it's the end of the world. The students' behaviour has never been so outrageous. It's all these damnable modern inventions that are the ruin of everything.

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. and nowadays this border has become unrecognizable.

What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times a thought can be refuted , yes, but not retracted . (p. 179)

The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.