Quotes About Modernism

The difficulty with big cities does not lie in skyscrapers or high-rises per se; rather, it is the values concealed within those buildings which lead to the loss of our humanity and our sense of spiritual emptiness.

I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.

How strange it was to be inside a machine again! All his life he'd been inside machines, whether he realised it or not. Modern houses were machines. Shopping centres were machines. Schools. Cars. Trains. Cities. They were all sophisticated technological constructs, wired up with lights and motors. You switched them on, and didn't spare them a thought while they pampered you with unnatural services.

High modernism is numinous through and through, as the work of art provides one of the last outposts of enchantment in a spiritually degenerate world. Postmodernism, with its notorious absence of affect, is post-numinous. It is also in a sense post-aesthetic, since the aestheticisation of everyday life extends to the point where it undermines the very idea of a special phenomenon known as art. Stretched far enough, the category of the aesthetic cancels itself out.

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.

Un monde est absurde dans la mesure où le contemplatif, l'ermite et le moine, y apparaissent comme un paradoxe ou un "anachronisme". Or le moine est dans l'actualité précisément parce qu'il est intemporel : nous vivons à l'époque de l'idolâtrie du "temps", et le moine incarne tout ce qui est immuable, non par sclérose ou par inertie, mais par transcendance.

I don't know what young fellows want to go in for those sort of things for?" I said. "Wars are a waste of time; and advertising is all lies." "I am afraid, my dear Mister Le Page," he said, looking very sorry for me, "you are an anachronism.

Modern women ... they don't sew your pockets ... forget that.

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.

The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.

Modernism is typically defined as the condition that begins when people realize God is truly dead, and we are therefore on our own.

Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.

The same way that mid century modern architecture was in the 50s, I want to be as a human being. New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines.

Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.

Arta de a divaga – È™i a r?mâne totuÈ™i în veÈ™nicie – mi se pare un secret pe care majoritatea modernilor l-au uitat

Many modern and postmodern texts are essentially ironic, in which the allusions to biblical sources are used not to heighten continuities between the religious tradition and the contemporary moment but to illustrate a disparity or disruption.

shaping such sad imaginings. She was expressing in her own native phrases… feelings which might almost have been called those of the age – the ache of modernism

This [Ulysses] is obviously the wave of the future, I'm glad I'm dying of tuberculosis.

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (1888–1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. When she was 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. During the First World War, she contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34.

Que noche! dijo -¿Conosce usted ese poema de Safo sobre sus manos en las estrellas...? Soy curiosamente sáfica. Y eso es tan importante... No sólo soy sáfica; encuentro en las obras de arte de todos los grandes autores, sobre todo en sus cartas inédtas, cierto aire, cierto indicio de mí misma... cierto parecido, cierta parte de mí misma, como mil reflejos de mis propias manos en un espejo oscuro El espirítu moderno - En un balneario alemán

and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers."44 Where primitives identify themselves with the world itself, moderns identify themselves with the part of them that controls the world: the ego.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.

Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.