Modernism Quotes

“Revolution is inherent to the modern civilization, Modernity started with a revolution, it will probably not end with a revolution.”
― Isaiah Senones

“To be born in that city - I went so far as to write once, thinking not of myself but of Lila’s pessimism - is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“As you sing it it's a study. That letter selfpenned to one's other, that neverperfect everplanned?”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Modernism deliberately abstracted Nature and glamorized convenience, and this is why we have ended up seeing the natural world as some sort of gigantic production system seemingly capable of ever-increasing outputs for our benefit. … We have become semi-detached bystanders, empirically correct spectators, rather than what the ancients understood us to be, which is participants in creation. This ideology was far from benign or just a matter of fashion. The Marxism of the Bolshevik regime totally absorbed, adopted and extended the whole concept of Modernism to create the profoundly soulless, vicious, dehumanized ideology which eventually engineered the coldly calculated death of countless millions of its own citizens as well as entire living traditions, all for the simple reason that the end justified the means in the great ‘historic struggle’ to turn people against their true nature and into ideological, indoctrinated ‘machines.”
― Charles III, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World

“Once we start to celebrate ugliness, we become ugly to.”
― Roger Scruton

“But I know many things I can't say.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“We are all born with different masks (on) - the art is to make them look like ourselves.”
― Laura Chouette

“As I lay on the bed I could see the big mirror on the other side of the room but could not see what it reflected.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“When I was young,
I only painted flowers;
Once I became older
I learnt that flowers meant hope.
We give them when we meet someone
for the first time,
and we give them
to bury someone
as a final goodbye.”
― Laura Chouette

“Forgetting someone you once loved:
it’s like erasing something of yourself forever
-freely;
Being someone else for a second
that will change a lifetime.
You let go.
You feel lost.
You will love again.”
― Laura Chouette

“The dancers were in a crowd, so you did not see the intricate play of the feet. All you saw was the heads and shoulders going up and down, up and down.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta

“Dimly, at the back of her mind, she was thinking: Why are we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing important?”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gipsy

“To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that's the point. The sufferings will be tremendous, but one must be strong, be born a poet: it is in no way my fault.”
― Arthur Rimbaud , Illuminations

“Newspaper letters review the deserted cities
& drowse at the windows in pale sun & the evening breeze’s rales.

The train has stopped.
("Anna Karenina / October 18, 1910," Translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould )”
― Hasan Alizadeh, House Arrest

“So to say that you don't believe in the "supernatural" is a contradiction in terms - because it means that you also don't believe in the "natural". Neither can exist without the other.'
'Oh come on', I said impatiently. 'That's just semantics'.
'Yes, you're right. But the whole world is made up of semantics and yours are those of the seventeenth century. Even though you think you are modern.”
― Amitav Ghosh

“The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?” But it isn’t silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.”
― John Steinbeck

“We were given one heart - yet we break it so carelessly.”
― Laura Chouette

“Poetry is the heart of the soul.”
― Laura Chouette

“My soul is made out of poetry.”
― Laura Chouette

“Now, we must go insane in order to understand”
― chauncey alan

“Change is beautiful inside a world made out of constant expectations.”
― Laura Chouette

“How magnificent a lifetime feels once it is held together by something that is worth loving.”
― Laura Chouette

“I do believe
that the Catholic Church
is too brocken
to be saved by faith -
it would take true believe
to build something like it again.”
― Laura Chouette

“For all our modernist beliefs in truth, evidence, logic, and fairness, perhaps we have reached a point of no return in the writing of history where modern progressives attack the historical record with malice aforethought, leaving us stupider than we were before this movement took shape in the 1960s, when the twentysomething Hochschild was at the barricades protesting Vietnam and all the rest. It is for future generations to re-colonize history using the precious intellectual resources of the Enlightenment. Until then, we do well to fight the progressive warlords like Hochschild who enslave formerly colonized peoples in distorted victimization narratives that rob them of agency, all the while keeping the white man front and center.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“And surely, whatever, in this its course of change, poetry may have lost in quality, is more than made up for by what it has gained in quantity. For in the first place it is far pleasanter to the tastes of a scientific generation, to understand how to make bad poetry than to wonder at good; and secondly, as the end of poetry is pleasure, that we should make it each for ourselves is the very utmost that we can desire, since it is a fact in which we all agree, that no man's verses please him so much as his own.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, Every Man His Own Poet: Or The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book

“Just as a consummate cook will prepare a most delicate repast out of the most poor materials, so will the modern poet concoct us a most popular poem from the weakest emotions, and the most tiresome platitudes. The only difference is, that the cook would prefer good materials if he could get them, whilst the modern poet will take the bad from choice.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, Every Man His Own Poet Or, The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book

“Institutions like the Zendo are becoming anachronistic and obsolete; its tradition is wearing out, and the spirit that has been controlling the discipline of the monks for so many hundred years is no more holding itself against the onslaught of modernism.”
― Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, The Training Of The Zen Buddhist Monk

“In the quest for “objective truth,” the the modern agenda distances the learner from the subject and therefore distances understanding.”
― Alex Sosler, Learning to Love: Christian Higher Education as Pilgrimage

“A disastrous habit of certain theologians popular among progressive Catholics is their equivocal use of terms. One crucial example is their use of the term future. One moment it refers to eternity, the next to the historical future — that is, to the generation to come in the course of human history. But eternity and the historical future are such totally different realities that the term future cannot be used for both without falling into a complete equivocation. Teilhard de Chardin’s naturalistic and evolutionalistic interpretation of man’s destiny had obviously played a role in promoting this confusion”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Trojan Horse in the City of God: The Catholic Crisis Explained

“Art puts me trough life
and trough art I see life.”
― Laura Chouette