Quotes About Moderns

Now that we moderns have stripped the earth of its mystery—have made, in Saul Bellow's description, "a housecleaning of belief"—how are our imaginations to be nourished? By Hollywood and made-for-TV movies?

As every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, the multitude must be held in by invisible terrors and suchlike pageantry. For this reason I think, not that the ancients acted rashly & at haphazard in introducing among the people notions concerning the gods & beliefs in the terrors of hell, but that the moderns are most rash & foolish in banishing such beliefs" (Book 6, sec. 56)

The life of famous men was more glorious in antiquity; the life of obscure men is happier with the moderns.

One reason we misunderstand allegory is that we moderns think that reading is a matter of garnering information. For ancient Christians, reading scripture is a matter of being changed from one degree of glory to another, of being transformed (2 Cor. 3:18).

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them -- structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible.

Vico's terminology follows the principle of his oration Study Methods: to balance the moderns against the ancients. The reader is asked to have Joyce's ''two thinks at a time'' (FW 583.7), to move between the modern and Vico's meaning. Vico does not simply replace modern meanings with his own original ones. He repeatedly faces the reader with both.

But the important test question here isn't whether Christianity teaches egalitarianism or an old earth, but what if it clearly didn't? Would we be embarrassed then? What if Scripture really taught all those horrible things mocked so loudly by moderns-would we be ashamed? This is a wonderful personal test. Think of the most horrible moral or scientific accusation raised against the Christian faith and then ask, what if it's true? Would we be embarrassed to stand by Christ?

That's why moderns have to have hobbies. They can't find satisfaction in their money-earning work, so many seek creative satisfaction in model planes and trains.

In our world,' said Eustace, 'a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.' 'Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what a star is made of.'"1 Think for a moment about what a bizarre place the universe actually is, and how we moderns have tried to use our powers of imagination to tame it, instead of using our imaginations for the purpose that God gave them to us—to enable us to see it.

The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners.

The moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack and far less easy to conquer than the mere fact of servitude: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color.

With the outbreak of the H1N1 virus, moderns have been reintroduced to the threat of pandemics. We have always been susceptible, of course, but most of us have short memories. When the next plague strikes, do we cite Psalm 91:5-7?

Vain labour for me — vain labour almost for the grave English language — to do justice to the sparkling paradoxes that flew from lip to lip. The favourite theme was the superiority of the moderns to the ancients. Condorcet on this head was eloquent, and to some, at least, of his audience, most convincing. That Voltaire was greater than Homer few there were disposed to deny. Keen was the ridicule lavished on the dull pedantry which finds everything ancient necessarily sublime.

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.

We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.

To many moderns, [love] is something that is only a part of us rather than something of which we are a part.

Like Art, Tea has its periods and its schools. Its evolution may be roughly divided into three main stages: the Boiled Tea, the Whipped Tea, and the Steeped Tea. We moderns belong to the last school. These several methods of appreciating the beverage are indicative of the spirit of the age in which they prevailed. For life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thought.

Moderns fancy themselves as more intellectually sophisticated than ancient man, yet they are often ignorant of the fact that their notions of existential angst and individual identity that they think is the erudite offerings of modern existentialist philosophers like Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Nietzsche, were wrestled with millennia before the chaotic narcissistic spasm of the modern period.

Nazi kitsch may bear a blood relationship to the highbrow religion of art proclaimed by many moderns.

Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.