Top 100 Contemporaries Quotes
#1. These composers," Captain Nemo answered me, "are the contemporaries of Orpheus, because in the annals of the dead, all chronological differences fade; and
Jules Verne
#2. In many ways, Tucker Carlson's a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following.
Alex Pareene
#3. I never had ambitions to see how rich I could get. I got a lot of contemporaries that that's their ambition, and I don't know very many of them that are happy.
Carroll Shelby
#4. Most of my contemporaries at school entered the World of Business, the logical destiny of bores.
Barry Humphries
#5. The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.
Ellen Glasgow
#6. The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.
Paul Weller
#7. At about an age when most children start full time schooling, hundreds of thousands of their contemporaries start a lifetime of drudgery in factories and fields, working 12-16 hours daily.
Kailash Satyarthi
#8. The time and intelligence that our ancestors spent on understanding the sovereignty revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are directed by our contemporaries in affirming and validating the sovereignty of our needs, wants, and feelings.
Eugene H. Peterson
#9. If you find your sustenance in Christ, my dear young people, and if you live profoundly in him as did the Apostle Paul, you will not be able to resist speaking about him and making him known and loved by many of your friends and contemporaries.
Pope Benedict XVI
#10. I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.
Walker Evans
#11. However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.
Vera Brittain
#12. I have always been amazed at my contemporaries' lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.
Samuel Beckett
#13. Rembrandt didn't idealize his subjects. He painted what he saw, which was a mixture of glory and fallenness. He was criticized by his contemporaries for using washerwomen as his models rather than women who looked like Greek goddesses.
Steve Turner
#14. Thus men of more enlighten'd genius and more intrepid spirit must compose themselves to the risque of public censure, and the contempt of their jealous contemporaries, in order to lead ignorant and prejudic'd minds into more happy and successful methods.
Jon Jones
#15. I watch my contemporaries, and they love to live in the studio and I don't. I have a life. I treat it as a 9-to-5. I try to create something new every day, and then I get on with my life.
Brian McKnight
#16. Jesus's message to his contemporaries, and the church's message about Jesus, never fit what people expect. Often enough, they don't fit what the church itself expects.
N. T. Wright
#17. It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries ... but our children's friends must show a blank service record.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#18. Often individuals whose mental gifts so far outpaced their contemporaries, tended to lack the social graces commensurate with their other accomplishments.
Kirsten Beyer
#19. It remains an irrefragable law of history that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.
Stefan Zweig
#20. There are days when I am haunted by a feeling that is blacker than the blackest melancholy. I have a contempt for humanity. I despise the people I have been fated to call my contemporaries. I feel suffocated by their filthy breath.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#21. No British Prime Minister of the last seventy years has been more harshly stereotyped than Stanley Baldwin. No one has been so much ignored, after the initial judgements of contemporaries had been made.
Stanley Baldwin
#22. As a Texan, I say ma'm and sir to my age contemporaries and open doors for anyone that I can. This goes for men, too, though it is appreciated when they beat me to it and disappointing when they don't.
Tiffany Madison
#23. A film like Genevieve to my contemporaries is not a film made years ago, but last week or last year. They see me as I was then, not as I am now.
Kenneth More
#24. Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall - but what a wall!
Thomas Hardy
#25. No maxim can be more pernicious than that which would teach us to consult the temper of the times, and to tell only so much as we imagine our contemporaries will be able to bear.
William Godwin
#26. Michelangelo's contemporaries thought him the greatest artist who ever lived and called him 'divine.' His reputation as sculptor, architect, painter and draughtsman has not subsequently been surpassed, and who is to say his contemporaries were wrong?
Michael Ayrton
#27. My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own.
Pat Conroy
#28. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, 'Well, so-and-so will like this,' which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
Gore Vidal
#29. In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#30. Only Gnostics and contemporaries qualify, for they alone are both severed from their unconscious and aware of the fact.
C. G. Jung
#31. There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#32. Nothing is more common than to find men, whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries as the oracles of their age, and the legislators of science.
Samuel Johnson
#33. With historicals, the research is half the fun. Contemporaries are especially easy. People are right out there in front of you; you meet them every day. You can concentrate wholly on the story and characters.
Heather Graham Pozzessere
#34. The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
#35. Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants
both know too much of him.
Charles Caleb Colton
#36. Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
Robert Morgan
#37. I've seen many of my contemporaries become superstars, and the way fame and fortune starts to really affect the way they treat other people, and I think it's ugly.
Siobhan Fahey
#38. The fact about contemporaries is that they're doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past, the wrong way- something like that: from timidity, partly, one keeps one's eyes on one's own road.
Virginia Woolf
#40. Well, painting today certainly seems very vibrant, very alive, very exiting. Five or six of my contemporaries around New York are doing very vital work, and the direction that painting seems to be taken here - is - away from the easel - into some sort, some kind of wall, wall painting ...
Jackson Pollock
#41. Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.
Philip Gilbert Hamerton
#42. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#43. The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next twenty-five or fifty years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.
Milton Friedman
#44. If you live at the same time as great contemporaries, you become a flower getting rain live.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#45. May all our contemporaries stand beside their brothers and sisters in humanity. Each one of you is called by Christ and must be a missionary of the Good News in word and in active charity.
Pope Benedict XVI
#46. The worthless and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their contemporaries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. One must devote oneself to figuring out that one must live for the good, for its own sake. It was a secular morality. Contemporaries did not know what to call a thing like that - he questioned their every faith, their every way of life - so they called it atheism.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#48. A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.
Robert Musil
#49. What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. History belongs above all to the man ... who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#51. For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
Cesare Pavese
#52. I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.
Charles Kuralt
#53. Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.
Charles Caleb Colton
#54. Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#55. The pyramid once passed there was still a short way to go before we confronted the Sphinx, in the middle of what our contemporaries have left him of his desert.
Pierre Loti
#56. It is very likely that workhouse children were better fed than their contemporaries living at home with poor parents. Of
Lesley Hulonce
#57. Your selling point is that unique quality like integrity,teachability, honesty, humility, skill, sagacity, love, self-confidence, vision, compassion and kindness which distinguishes you among your contemporaries.
Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
#58. All my contemporaries
hundred-and-fivers or convicts
will tell you how we lived
in barely sentient fear, raising
children for the executioner,
prison, or the torture chamber.
Anna Akhmatova
#59. It was Steinitz who was the first to establish the basic principles of general chess strategy. He was a pioneer and one of the most profound researchers into the thruth of the game, which was hidden from his contemporaries.
Jose Raul Capablanca
#61. The desire to enforce our own moral and spiritual criteria upon posterity is quite as strong as the desire to enforce them upon contemporaries.
Suzanne La Follette
#62. A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors.
Norbert Wiener
#63. The other actresses, who are called my contemporaries, they started with a megastar. They were superstars overnight and are the same even today.
Kangana Ranaut
#64. Are we to execrate our age- or all ages?
Do we think of Buddha as withdrawing from the world on account of his contemporaries?
Emil Cioran
#65. I had to bear witness in order to protect the future, bear witness in order to overcome the amnesia of my contemporaries.
Pierre Seel
#66. Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#67. The language of Doctor Johnson and Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale, and that of their adult contemporaries, was the stately language of the time, polished, stylish, unordinary, even in the intimate pages of their diaries, and the regime of instruction was severe and practical.
Robert Burchfield
#68. Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.
Harold E. Varmus
#69. For Reagan,for his contemporaries, and many in the generations after them, the word Munich was understood as code for any nation's stepping back from necessary toughness
Chris Matthews
#70. In the eyes of his contemporaries, he was a man who had committed the one unforgivable sin; he was proud of his wealth.
Ayn Rand
#71. I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.
Henry David Thoreau
#72. Contemporaries relate that hearing Martin Luther pray was "an experience in theology". They said the reformer began praying with such humility that he could be pitied, only to proceed with such boldness before God that the human hearer would fear for him.
A.W. Tozer
#73. Since puberty I've always had this strange awareness that all the keener experiences I would have in my life would happen later than it would to my contemporaries. When it came to the career thing, I never worried about it. It's better if you're still peaking when you're 60, which I feel I am.
Richard Griffiths
#74. He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.
Thomas Hardy
#75. I'm a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.
Pablo Picasso
#76. We're all ghostwriters, my boy. And it's not just our memories. Our actions, too. We all think we're in control of our own lives, but really they're preghostwritten by forces around us." ========== Ghostwritten (Vintage Contemporaries) (Mitchell, David)
Anonymous
#77. When you're the best, and you know you're the best, and your contemporaries know you're the best, that's a terrific edge.
Raymond Floyd
#78. If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history.
A.S. Byatt
#79. I don't think I did anything that my contemporaries didn't; it was just that I was the only one who talked about it. In the Sixties anyone who had a sense of style seemed to be gay. I wanted to indentify with that.
David Bowie
#80. We are, now, just as valuable, intelligent, and real as Eliot or any of his contemporaries. Our ideas and experiences are just as sound and true. Our passion to save our world from what we see it becoming is just as authentic. We are always the Lost Generation, but with different accoutrements.
Nate Ragolia
#81. I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs - that's where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that's very cool.
David Bowie
#82. The medieval islamic world offered vastly more freedom than any of its predecessors, its contemporaries and most of its successors
Bernard Lewis
#83. If painters left nothing of themselves after their deaths, so that we were obliged to rank them as we do actors according to the judgment of their contemporaries, how different their reputations would be from what posterity has made them!
Eugene Delacroix
#84. I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries.
Henry David Thoreau
#85. The key to seeing why there should be a Eucharistic worship distinct from the Mass is that the Eucharist is Jesus Christ. No less than His contemporaries in Palestine adored and implored Him for the favors they needed, so we should praise, thank Him, and implore Him for what we need.
Pope Pius XII
#86. If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.
David Bowie
#87. By this measure (on the gap between Fischer & his contemporaries), I consider him the greatest world champion
Garry Kasparov
#88. In science, moreover, the work of the individual is so bound up with that of his scientific predecessors and contemporaries that it appears almost as an impersonal product of his generation.
Albert Einstein
#89. Reason unites us, not only with our contemporaries, but with men who lived two thousand years before us, and with those who will live after us.
Leo Tolstoy
#90. Why was I born with such contemporaries?
Oscar Wilde
#92. Fermat never cared to publish his investigations, but was always perfectly ready, as we see from his letters, to acquaint his friends and contemporaries with his results.
Thomas Little Heath
#93. If you would be accounted great by your contemporaries, be not too much greater than they.
Ambrose Bierce
#94. If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.
Randall Jarrell
#95. The aim I have set before me in this book is to give back to English readers the understanding of and delight in this great poet which thrilled his contemporaries and early successors.
Janet Spens
#96. I'm old enough to have friends and contemporaries who have long since retired, and that's their prerogative - enough is enough; it doesn't mean a thing to me. But I haven't got any money, so, you know, I just keep on working.
Mike Leigh
#97. Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have.
Cathleen Schine
#98. I started from B-grade films, and today I'm the number one actress of this country ... whereas other actresses, whom you might call my contemporaries, they have had no growth in whatever platform they were launched ... they are still there and have not risen to another platform.
Kangana Ranaut
#99. Let us, my dear contemporaries, arise above such narrow prejudices. If wisdom be desirable on its own account, if virtue, to deserve the name, must be founded on knowledge, let us endeavour to strengthen our minds by reflection till our heads become a balance for our hearts ...
Mary Wollstonecraft
#100. I'm not a serious photographer like many of my contemporaries. That is to say, I am serious about not being serious.
Elliott Erwitt
