Quotes About Modernity

Only the minute and the future are interesting in fashion.

People now think of the early 1800s being an industrial time of smoke and factories but, as with every age, it was a carousel of many periods at once. The past stays and echoes even as modernity roars ahead.

In modernity, it is not only works of art that are unfinished: the world they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion. There is no knowing, moreover, whether a conclusion will ever be added.

The glitz and glamour of the megapolis and modern times had become the golden calves that were being worshipped throughout the planet.

The issue is not simply one of needing to save the world, but also of needing to solve the problem of the loss of soul throughout the modern world. Part of what has been lost in the reckless rushing of modernity is the sense that each life has an authentic interior that shelters important emotions as well as inherent purpose, and that the dignity of existence includes a necessary instinct to unfold the unique story woven inside each living soul.

Dans le monde moderne on pouvait être échangiste, bi, trans, zoophile, SM, mais il était interdit d'être vieux. (La possibilité d'une île, Daniel 1,15)

Lo que primero llamaba la atención era la ausencia total de muebles, lo cual era posible gracias a la utilización sistemática de pequeñas diferencias de nivel a la altura del suelo. De este modo, las zonas destinadas a dormitorios eran excavaciones rectangulares de cuarenta centímetros de profundidad: uno bajaba a la caba en vez de subirte a ella. Las bañeras eran igualmente grandes pilas redondas cuyo reborde estaba situado a ras de suelo.

La carne del mundo es sustituida por su imagen numerizada; el ser de las cosas es suplantado por el gráfico de sus variaciones.

My idea is always to avoid nostalgia.

For millions of Arabs and Muslims, this universe of abstract systems, this world of Western freedom and individualism, constitutes the soullessness of modernity. The attack on the World Trade Center, in this interpretation, was not so much an attack on the United States, but on modernity—secular, non-tribal modernity—itself.

Modernity lives without love. Cynicism, sociopathy of commercialism, where inflation leads to mental impotence of indifference in solitude, where infantilism is the basis of idealism. The brain becomes a call center of indifference.

Those who claim that old is gold are the ones who despise change.

Those who succeed will be those who are open to change. Those who go in tune with the times.

Modernity has hitched its wagon to science, a form of discourse that challenges and undermines traditional narratives. But in order to legitimize itself, science needs a story of progress from opinion and superstition to scientific truth and on to universal peace and happiness. The Enlightenment project is inseparable from its legitimizing metanarratives.

late modernity has tried to squeeze more and more areas of human discourse into the first type of "truth," making a "fact" out of everything and thereby trying to put everything into the kind of box which can be weighed, measured, and verified as if it were an experiment in the hard sciences like chemistry, or even an equation in mathematics. But this attempt has overreached itself, not least in areas like history and sociology.

The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even, heaven help us, biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way into the postmodern world with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom.

What a pure blessing it was to have a bath in a tub alone in a room where all you had to do was pump the water, not tote buckets. Then all you had to do was pull out the cork, not tote more buckets to the back porch--that kind of thing is easy to take lightly until you don't have it.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

In general, the best clue to a nation's growth and development potential is the status and role of women. This is the greatest handicap of Muslim Middle Eastern societies today, the flaw that most bars them from modernity

With the rise of modern scientific (or 'rational') knowledge religion is, for the first time, challenged by the disparate claims of other life-orders (Lebensordnungen)... a polytheistic and disordered world of competing values and ideals... the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic and intellectual, which, with the onset of modernity, separate out into relatively autonomous realms (the process of Eigengeseztlichkeit) with their own value-spheres (Wertsphären).

What is new to modernity is a rate of the obsolescence of truth...

Modernity's like a badly trained dog: try and make it heel, even for a moment, and it turns and bites the hand that fed it.

The modern world is condemned precisely by all that with which modern man seeks to justify it.

Der moderne Mensch versucht mit der Unzucht, der Gewalt und der Niederträchtigkeit die Unschuld eines höllischen Paradieses zu schaffen.