Quotes About Modernism

The man of the modern world is used to speak what the modern world will hear; the writer of the modern world must write what that world will indulgently and pleasantly peruse.

Many modern artists, philosophers, and theologians reject the knowledge of the past. Thus they must continually start over again from ground zero, their vision restricted to their own narrow perspectives, making themselves artificially primitive.

inner life is inadequately recognised or honoured by many conservative leaders and spokesmen, in word or in work. In effect the theology of conservatism has been sacrificed to the new gods and the new morality of modernity. The discipline of spiritual conservatism has been manifestly lessened by its own peculiar form of liberation theology, as it were, and by the purely quantitative point of view prevailing in the marketplace of ideas.

The painter once believed in something, but now he paints only a hole without meaning, without anything- nothing but nothingness, the nothingness of our time.

'Canticum Sacrum' is wonderfully archaic. What Stravinsky does is extraordinary. It takes you on a journey from Gregorian chant right through to the modernism of Webern - and all in 17 minutes.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

Throughout history, cities have been associated with incredible bursts of creative energy - the Renaissance in Florence, or modernism in Paris. London is the cultural metropolis of the early 21st century.

Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.

Mindfullness is an invention by the modern world.

You have the 20th century wrapping up and everything is moving at this breakneck speed? And then, painting is still walking. It's just a very human activity that takes time.

Una de las consecuencias de la primacía del hombre-masa en la vida de las naciones es, dice, el desinterés de la sociedad aquejada de primitivismo y de vulgaridad por los principios generales de la cultura, es decir, por las bases mismas de la civilización.

While he was bored by free verse and cubism, he thought rather well of Dreiser, Cabell, and so much of Proust as he had rather laboriously mastered.

We were not meant to read stories anymore. We were too busy writing our own.

Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some present-day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages.

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.

My clothes are made of monosodium glutamate and hexachlorophene. My food is made of polyester, rayon and lurex. My rug lotions contain vitamins. Do my vitamins feature cleaning agents? I hope so. My brain is gimmicked by a microprocessor the size of a quark, and costing ten pee and running the whole deal. I am made of — junk, I'm just junk.

If Buddhists choose to model their lives on the liberated arahant—or the idealized Mahayana bodhisattva, for that matter—rather than follow the example of Gotama, then I wonder how Buddhism will find a compelling voice to address the pressing issues of our world today.

The poor bloody poet can no longer say "ope" for "open," or "swain" for "youth," he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social intercourse.

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

The notion of severality of function is, regrettably, one that was gradually abandoned throughout the twentieth century because it did not accord with modernism's puritanical espousal of 'honesty'.

En el campo de la familia podemos decir cosas muy parecidas: al haberse colado el hedonismo y la permisividad, con todo lo que traen consigo, hoy son muchos los que tienen una idea de la familia sin consistencia y podemos comprobar la escasa inteligencia para la vida que tienen.

Anti-Semitism was thus one of the keys of a 'reactionary modernism' based on a synthesis of modern rationality and technology with the conservative values of the anti-Enlightenment

The isolated use and handing down of the famous term 'religionless Christianity' has made Bonhoeffer the champion of an undialectical shallow modernism which obscures all that he wanted to tell us about the living God. —EBERHARD BETHGE

The death of the spirit is the price of progress.