#modernity

The only way to gain power in a world that is moving too fast is to learn to slow down. And the only way to spread one’s influence wide to learn how to go deep. The world we want for ourselves and our children will not emerge from electronic speed but rather from a spiritual stillness that takes root in our souls. Then, and only then, will we create a world that reflects the heart instead of shattering it. ↗

— Marianne Williamson

#peace #spirit #technology #change

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#modern-art #modernity #art

...my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#fragility #internet-addiction #modern-values #modernity #modernity-is-a-sickness

If they analyze the situation as thoroughly as they should, Muslims will realize they are the first targets. What are the fundamentalists really after? Simply taking over Islam and then turning its back on modernity. ↗

— Alexander Haig

#analyze #back #first #fundamentalists #islam

Our federal Constitution embodies the idea of modern India: it defines not only India but also modernity. ↗

— Pranab Mukherjee

#constitution #defines #embodies #federal #idea

I am familiar with the modern world – of thirty years ago. Since then, I have stayed modern and the world has accelerated into the dark ages. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #humor #medievalism #modernity #old-fashioned

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons. ↗

— Roman Payne

#cash #credit-cards #digital-age #gold #literary-style

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts. ↗

— Herman Wouk

#death #ground-zero #manhattan #modernity #sadism

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#evangelism #fear #modern #modern-life #modern-values

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development — part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" — has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so — and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few — have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author. ↗

— James Shapiro

#readers-and-writers #reading #experience