Quotes About Contemporaries

It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the 1930s; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made that choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course.

How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be? Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion - you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

Of the early history of Romanus Lecapenus – or, as we must now call him, the Emperor Romanus I – all too little has come down to us. His father, known universally to contemporaries as Theophylact the Unbearable, was an Armenian peasant

After high school I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, and I began a formalized art education where we went through the history of art but we also went through the art of my contemporaries.

Learn from the masters, learn from your contemporaries. Always try to update yourself.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

In revolutionary times, those who accord themselves, with an extraordinary arrogance, the facile credit for having inflamed anarchy in their contemporaries fail to recognize that what appears to be a sad triumph is in fact due to a spontaneous disposition, determined by the social situation as a whole. —AUGUSTE COMTE, Cours de philosophie positive, Leçon 48

Methodius thought of how Homer and the holy prophet had been contemporaries, how Homer's poetic state had been larger than the state of Alexander of Macedonia. . . . He also thought of how Homer had at some point written into his work the name of Sidon. . . . in Sidon sat the prophet Elijah, who was to become an inhabitant of another poetic state, one as vast, eternal, and powerful as Homer's own — an inhabitant of the Holy Scriptures.

Jesus's message to his contemporaries, and the church's message about Jesus, never fit what people expect. Often enough, they don't fit what the church itself expects.

I distrust every idea that doesn't seem obsolete and grotesque to my contemporaries.

Whereas contemporaries read only the optimist with enthusiasm, posterity rereads the pessimist with admiration.

The only 18th-century writer to be revived by the admiration of our contemporaries is de Sade. Visitors to a palace who admire nothing but the latrines.

I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.