Modern Quotes

“I want everyone to wear what they want and mix it in their own way. That, to me, is what is modern.”
― Karl Lagerfeld

“Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.”
― Rashedur Ryan Rahman

“This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.”
― Salvador Dalí

“I got the job as a Bingo host and did better than they imagined. Never before had they had an emcee so affable and funny, so enthusiastic to give away prizes, or so quick to make a tumor joke after calling out 'B-9'".”
― John Bennardo, Just a Typo: The Cancellation of Celebrity Mo Riverlake

“It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.”
― Mark Rothko

“To be modern is to tear the soul out of every thing”
― Yohji Yamamoto, My Dear Bomb

“Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Tampaknya hanya buku yang paling pantas diceritakan dengan bangga oleh manusia beradab, bukan BMW, Mercedes, ataupun Volvo. Apabila ada manusia di zaman sekarang yang menyebut dirinya modern tetapi tidak mengindahkan buku, memilikinya, dan membacanya, maka dengan demikian manusia tersebut telah mengambil inisiatif menjadikan dirinya sebagai hewan.”
― Remy Sylado

“heir eyes met. They both smiled, aware that they were in public, where anyone could see them on the street and in the window. But the rest of the world did not matter. For that moment, everything else vanished. He was there, she was there, no trouble could touch them.”
― Jeanette Watts, My Dearest Miss Fairfax

“In essence I find that the foundation of modern conservatism is driven by a clinging to God in fear of the world, whereas the foundation of modern liberalism is a clinging to the world in fear of God; albeit, the true foundation should be one's clinging to God in fear of God.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“Soon all of you immortals
Will be as dead as we are!
Come on then, what are you waiting for?
Have you run out of thunderbolts?”
― Euripides, The Trojan Women

“We are living in modern times throughout the world and yet are dominated by medieval minds.”
― Eqbal Ahmad, Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire

“Dan bukankan satu ciri manusia modern adalah juga kemenangan individu atas lingkungannya dengan prestasi individual? Individu-individu kuat sepatutnya bergabung mengangkat sebangsanya yang lemah, memberinya lampu pada yang kegelapan dan memberi mata pada yang buta”
― Pramoedya Ananta Toer

“..dan modern adalah juga kesunyian manusia yatim-piatu dikutuk untuk membebaskan diri dari segala ikatan yang tidak diperlukan: adat, darah, bahkan juga bumi, kalau perlu juga sesamanya.”
― Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Jejak Langkah

“To be modern means to like antique furniture - and youthful neurosis.”
― Hugo von Hofmannsthal

“The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.
On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services.

It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new.

So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really , as they say, the enjoyment of new things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“You can't do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

“Here's a new 'Blessing' for our time --

'May Anderson Cooper never be sent to report on your town!”
― Vera Nazarian

“April was just beginning, and after the warm spring day it turned cooler, slightly frosty, and a breath of spring could be felt in the soft, cold air. The road from the convent to town was sandy, they had to go at a walking pace; and on both sides of the carriage, in the bright, still moonlight, pilgrims trudged over the sand. And everyone was silent, deep in thought, everything around was welcoming, young, so near— the trees, the sky, even the moon—and one wanted to think it would always be so.”
― Anton Chekov, Short Stories

“Modernisasi pada akhirnya memang suatu permainan kekuatan. Ada yang tergusur, ada yang menggusur. Ada yang menang, ada yang telantar lemah. Tapi jangan salah kira: di zaman seperti ini, yang lemah tak akan tinggal jadi gurun: “yang lemah berbahaya bagi yang kuat, sebagaimana pasir hanyut berbahaya bagi si gajah,“ kata Tagore tentang dunia modern.”
― Goenawan Mohamad, Catatan Pinggir 1

“Entertainment is temporary happiness, but the real happiness is permanent entertainment.”
― Amit Kalantri

“[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that...such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern methods”
― Ralph Linton

“...it seemed a part of her life, to step from the ancient to the modern, back and forth. She felt rather sorry for those who knew only one and not the other. It was better, she thought, to be able to select from the whole menu of human achievements than to be bound within one narrow range.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“Death frees us from the sickness of modern life.”
― Steven Magee

“Gone are the days when women were attracted by a man's hansomeness. Today, we are talking about cash, and your compromise to become a tiger in bed.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“The great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he *had* allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly--these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the 'swagger' things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over *all* for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. ("The Jolly Corner")”
― Henry James, Complete Stories 1892–1898

“All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with India rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It’s all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They’re all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but machine-fucking! — It’s all alike. Pay ’em money to cut off the world’s cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind, and leave ’em all little twiddling machines.”
― D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“OBSOLETE, adj. No longer used by the timid. Said chiefly of words. A word which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object of dread and loathing to the fool writer, but if it is a good word and has no exact modern equivalent equally good, it is good enough for the good writer. Indeed, a writer's attitude toward "obsolete" words is as true a measure of his literary ability as anything except the character of his work. A dictionary of obsolete and obsolescent words would not only be singularly rich in strong and sweet parts of speech; it would add large possessions to the vocabulary of every competent writer who might not happen to be a competent reader.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“Pod kvazi-mitskim totalitetom tehničke racionalnosti prijeti nam inteligencija bez patosa, inteligencija kojoj nije potreban nikakav jezik koji ima svoj vlastiti smisao jer ionako sve funkcionira bez bilo kakvog proturječja; ta inteligencija ne zna za spomen jer nije ugrožena nikakvim zaboravom: čovjek kao kompjuterizirana inteligencija bez osjetljivosti na patnju i bez morala, ukratko: čovjek kao rapsodija nedužnosti jednoga glatko funkcionirajućeg stroja. Treba li doista to biti čovjek nakon smrti čovjeka?”
― Johann Baptist Metz, Memoria passionis: Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft

“Don’t let the modern love change you too much that you forget what it is to live with kindness and compassion.

From (The Awakening)”
― Jyoti Patel