Modern Thought Quotes

#1. The proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day.

Steven Weinberg

#2. We need to understand enough of modern thought to identify the ways it blocks us from living out the Gospel the way God intends, both in terms of intellectual roadblocks and in terms of economic and structural changes that make it harder to live by Scriptural principles.

Nancy Pearcey

#3. Modern thought does not offer consolations, but upsets.

Mason Cooley

#4. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things

Albert Einstein

#5. One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state.

Karen Armstrong

#6. Should we tolerate the blatant incorrectness of religion? Tolerating ignorance, superstition and stupidity will not provide for a healthy advancement of our society. Religion is cancer for modern thought, rationality, and even common sense.

Odin Zeus McGaffer

#7. Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms ... Confusion here is fatal.

J.I. Packer

#8. Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.

John Berger

#9. From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist ... is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time ... Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?

Lucio Russo

#10. New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought.

Francis Picabia

#11. The kings of modern thought are dumb.

Matthew Arnold

#12. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern thought, but Hamlet invented it

Oscar Wilde

#13. In modern life the world belongs to the stupid, the insensitive and the disturbed. The right to live and triumph is today earned with the same qualifications one requires to be interned in a madhouse: amorality, hypomania and an incapacity for thought.

Fernando Pessoa

#14. In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities ... it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

G.K. Chesterton

#15. To be awarded a prize which takes its name from an illustrious Dutchman who at the same time was a great citizen of Europe and through his writings did so much to open up our modern world of sensibility and thought is indeed a most signal honour.

John G. D. Clark

#16. In the modern media age we are rarely surprised by what we see. Whether it's on television or film or in the theatre, everything is so advertised, so trailed, that most entertainment is merely what you thought it was going to be like.

Rowan Atkinson

#17. Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.

Stephen Leacock

#18. If Shakespeare thought comedy worthwhile, that means the rest of us can take a break from tragedy now and then without betraying our calling, even if the modern professional intellectual, a poseur by nature, has yet to discover this.

Mark Helprin

#19. The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

Garry Kasparov

#20. The influence of modern physics goes beyond technology. It extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in man's conception of the universe and his relation to it

Fritjof Capra

#21. French existentialism is an unhelpful philosophy in which to couch modern feminism: born from the ravages of the Second World War, it is a cynical, individualistic school of thought that posits the self and personal choice as the measure of life's entire meaning.

Naomi Wolf

#22. There was a time when men thought it was sexy to have a housewife waiting for him to come home from work in her slippers, but in modern society, I think an independent woman is even more sexy.

Kat Graham

#23. I thought that religion, for all the good it does, seemed too risky for our modern world.

A. J. Jacobs

#24. Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.

J.G. Ballard

#25. As the world grows older there is loss and gain - let us not with modern insolence and blindness imagine it all gain; [...] but neither must we with neo-pagan obscurity of thought imagine it all loss.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#26. Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men.

Alexander Herzen

#27. In interpreting a work of art, we draw upon our own aims and endeavors, inform it with a meaning that has its origin in our own ways of life and thought. In a word, any art that really affects us becomes to that extent modern art.

Arnold Hauser

#28. An interviewer asked me what book I thought best represented the modern American woman. All I could think of to answer was: Madame Bovary.

Joseph McCarthy

#29. It is not in the outward and visible world of material life that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science.What it has been, what is has done, what it will be or will do, as a matter of modern politics.

Matthew Arnold

#30. You know, I thought we could use a good myth about technology to help guide us through these particular modern waters right now.

Jeff Bridges

#31. Anna, like most English speakers, thought GASP was a silly name for the project. But the name got the point across. If there were modern wonders of the world, GASP - and Kali - stood as far above them as the Colossus of Rhodes had stood above man.

A. Ashley Straker

#32. We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

Brian Eno

#33. Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifer matches, which, in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#34. We thought there was also something that was humorous but at the same time powerful and deep about naming the album, 'Modern Vampires Of The City'.

Rostam Batmanglij

#35. Of the last two friends of yours who had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other thought it right to eat men ...

G.K. Chesterton

#36. I do wonder why modern society has made monogamy the one and only option. In England, it's always, 'Are you with him, or him?' Perish the thought it might be both.

Jade Jagger

#37. If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living.

Dave Barry

#38. In modern European thought a tragedy is occurring in that the original bonds uniting the affirmative attitude towards the world with ethics are, by a slow but irresistible process, loosening and finally parting. Out of my life and Thought.

Albert Schweitzer

#39. Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks.

Alexander McCall Smith

#40. I lost one illusion last night. I thought I had no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn't suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn't go with modern dress. It makes one look old. And it spoils one's career at critical moments.

Oscar Wilde

#41. Mma Ramotswe tucked the cheque safely away in her bodice. Modern business methods were all very well, she thought, but when it came to the safeguarding of money there were some places which had yet to be bettered.

Alexander McCall Smith

#42. Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I'd never been inside a smile before. Who'd have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once

Ali Smith

#43. WHY DO YOU THINK LEAN EFFORTS FAIL---PROVIDED THOSE HAVE NO ENSURED HI-FI SOPHISTICATION TAG ACCORDING TO MODERN CENTURY GLOBAL WALK SPIRIT IN EVERY ANGLE OF FOR-THOUGHT TO KEEP EAGLE EYE ENSURENCE IN TO CHALLENGING FUTURE.

Various

#44. My friendships and relationships in the conservative world are not predicated on political correctness and enforced conformity of thought. They are based, instead, on mutual respect, honesty and understanding - concepts many modern liberals should consider revisiting.

Tammy Bruce

#45. I didn't need a man, but if I wanted one I'd take him and use him and then pass him along without a second thought, because I'd become a sophisticated, modern woman if it killed me. Sure. And I would lose ten pounds and age backward, too. Right after I learned to fly my invisible jet.

Joanna Wylde

#46. It really was amazing, thought Mindy, the way modern electronics made it so easy to ignore those people who were physically so close.

James Rozoff

#47. Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.

Nancy Pearcey

#48. No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated ... to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

Ellen Glasgow

#49. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times a thought can be refuted, yes, but not retracted. (p. 179)

Milan Kundera

#50. Let us get of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients thought divine can be found and felt there still.

Richard Jefferies

#51. None of us had any idea of how successful Downton was going to be. I thought I was signing up for another period drama that had a slightly modern feel. It had a freedom about it because it was coming out of the head of Julian Fellowes. Anything could happen and generally did.

Dan Stevens

#52. Mythology was not about theology, in the modern sense, but about human experience. People thought that gods, humans, animals and nature were inextricably bound up together, subject to the same laws, and composed of the same divine substance. There

Karen Armstrong

#53. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.

William James

#54. I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.

Alexander Herzen

#55. Growth is widely thought to be the panacea for all the major economic ills of the modern world.

Herman Daly

#56. It is a sobering thought that Gomer Pyle and the Beverly Hillbillies may be among our chief interstellar emissaries.

Kurt Vonnegut

#57. What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.

John Shelby Spong

#58. Modern life is given over to immoderation. Immoderation invades everything: actions and thought, public and private life.

Simone Weil

#59. In sum, thought and reflection have been rendered thoroughly pointless by the circumstances in which modern men and women live and act.

Jacques Ellul

#60. If the attitude of many non-Catholic modern philosophers toward Catholic thought could be summarized in a single sentence, it would be: It has been tried, it has produced its definitive results, which have been found lacking, and now its time is past

Gregory B. Sadler

#61. Modern science developed in the context of western religious thought, was nurtured in universities first established for religious reasons, and owes some of its greatest discoveries and advances to scientists who themselves were deeply religious.

Kenneth R. Miller

#62. The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as to direct the thought of most of the world - primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I.

Noam Chomsky

#63. Takes us the farther distance from the Old World to something new and revolutionary in human thought. That moral center, however, is hard to find with modern eyes. Locating it requires

Niccolo Machiavelli

#64. Modern minds no longer object to the Church because of the way they think, but because of the way they live. They no longer have difficulties with the Creed, but with her Commandments. The heresy of our day is not the heresy of thought, but of action.

Fulton J. Sheen

#65. How significant is Aristotle? Well, I wouldn't want to exaggerate, so let me put it this way: Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought.

Edward Feser

#66. I'm really grateful. But I never had the rock star dream. I thought it would be cool to be a modern-day composer.

Julian Casablancas

#67. When Tim Allen made The Santa Clause, I thought that was a delightful film. It took a modern sensibility but layered onto it a kind of sentiment.

Leonard Maltin

#68. With a bored pride; in their own hands a shallow mindless electronic device - it is without doubt - a damning indictment of modern society.

Kristian Goldmund Aumann

#69. I now resolved to go to bed early, with a firm purpose of also rising early the next day to revisit this charming walk; for I thought to myself, I have now seen this temple of the modern world imperfectly; I have seen it only by moonlight.

Karl Philipp Moritz

#70. 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

#71. He thought the police would have to do better; everyone knew the cult boys had more modern guns

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#72. Wrangling about precisely what constitutes genuine philosophy, proper philosophical practice, method, and aims is an important part of modern philosophy's content and heritage

Gregory B. Sadler

#73. I never thought I would get such a perfect role in 'Modern Family.' A lot of TV shows now are looking for more Latin women.

Sofia Vergara

#74. What could be more entrancing than a carefree nomadic existence camping, moving, exploring strange places and the ruins of forgotten empires, sleeping under canvas or the open sky, and giving no thought to the conventions and restriction of the modern world?

M.M. Kaye

#75. Modern surgery has been like a miracle to those who thought the pain was going to go on forever.

Maeve Binchy

#76. The main reason for the failure of the modern medical science is that it is dealing with results and not causes. Nothing more than the patching up of those attacked and the burying of those who are slain, without a thought being given to the real strong hold.

Edward Bach

#77. The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, "To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls." Another one said, "To describe blow-jobs artistically.

Kurt Vonnegut

#78. I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity. But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though perhaps I thought that, even in that point, He had an advantage over some of His modern critics.

G.K. Chesterton

#79. I'm sorry to pull you out of your classes, but your adviser understands," Kitteredge said. "He's a friend of the family."

So that's it, Neal thought. You bought me; you own me.

Don Winslow

#80. I thought for a month or so along the lines of what I call Monsieur Beaucaire in modern clothes. By that, I mean a hero who is believed by all to be a villain but who, in the end, is introduced as a man of great honor with a long list of decorations.

Preston Sturges

#81. Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.

Lytton Strachey

#82. It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

P.G. Wodehouse

#83. They have no chill whatsoever." "I thought that was a more modern term." "Evil?" "No. Chill.

Rick Riordan

#84. The animism paradigm has resurged in magic probably because of
a strong anarchist (or anti-authority) strain in modern magical thought. Animism offers a way to work with the spirit paradigm without issues of hierarchy intruding.

Patrick Dunn

#85. I always thought martial arts was the most modern choreography we could have right now, and I always wanted to put it to music.

Lou Reed

#86. We thought of universities as the cathedrals of the modern world. In the middle ages, the cathedral was the center and symbol of the city. In the modern world, its place could be taken by the university.

Roger Revelle

#87. The young specialist in English Lit, ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

Isaac Asimov

#88. When I read Katana's run in 'Birds of Prey,' I was curious about her restraint. She didn't laugh, didn't loosen up, didn't seem to have a light side. I thought, well, that demure nature is what we believe of women of Old Japan, so she seemed not like a modern Japanese but from an earlier time.

Ann Nocenti

#89. One thing I've always thought about Morgana is that she's sort of a modern mind in a period body. She's not your usual warm princess, which is what drew me to her in the first place.

Katie McGrath

#90. The moment of drifting into thought has been so clipped by modern technology. Our lives are filled with distraction with smartphones and all the rest. People are so locked into not being present.

Glen Hansard

#91. The bad preacher takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out into the traditional language of Christianity. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear modern dress.

C.S. Lewis

#92. I thought suddenly Look. If Kambei had stopped recruiting when the first samurai didn't work out a 205-minute masterpiece of modern cinema would have been over at minute 32.

Helen DeWitt

#93. Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the non-thought of received ideas.

Milan Kundera

#94. In the old days, people thought that wouldn't be amenable to life. Modern studies with computers have shown that it's okay to be tidally locked. If a planet heats up on one side and not the other, the atmosphere can still circulate, because heat wants to move around.

Sara Seager

#95. I like silent pictures and I always have ... I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film.

Akira Kurosawa

#96. Fundamentalism takes different forms in different religions, but there is one striking similarity in all forms of fundamentalist thought. Each wishes dearly to hold in check all varieties of 'modern' or 'decadent' thinking.

Jay Parini

#97. Modern science knows much about such conflicts. We call the mental state that engenders it "ambivalence": a collision between thought and feeling.

David Seabury

#98. The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.

Darcey Steinke

#99. The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.

Edmund White

#100. Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.

Terry Eagleton