Top 1200 Modern Literature Quotes & Sayings - Page 6

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

They were the first Westerners. The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery; and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.

At this point, I think I would garner a lot of hate mail if I was now on the cover of Modern Drummer seeing as I'm not a modern drummer anymore.

Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.

With 'Ilustrado,' I set out to change the way we read literature, and I think I failed spectacularly. In fact, I know I failed. In reaching further than I could, I may not have produced a life- or literature-changing book, but I did produce one I am proud of.

To modern educated people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascertained by observation, not by consulting ancient authorities. But this is an entirely modern conception, which hardly existed before the seventeenth century.

When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.

If the purpose of literature is to illuminate human nature, the purpose of fantastic literature is to do that from a wider perspective. You can say different things about what it means to be human if you can contrast that to what it means to be a robot, or an alien, or an elf.

The modern dance is no dance in the first place, and when you've finally learned it, it's not modern any more.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.

All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.

The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

What 'Strong Island' does is bring a historical perspective and help people understand that what we're treating as a modern-day phenomenon is actually not modern. It's actually quite old.

An accomplished woman is one who has a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing and the modern languages; she must be well trained in the fighting styles of the Kyoto masters and the modern tactics and weaponry of Europe.

This word "redemption," what is it about this word? Is it tangible? Do you know when it has happened? Is it necessary in a drama? Does it make a character boring? Does everyone agree on a character being "redeemed?" Or is it a word that is so subjective and polarizing and insignificant in modern television? It is a word that has been given, quite possibly, far too much significance, when it is truly ambiguous and meaningless in a drama. I have personally grown to loathe that word in literature.

Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.

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.

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

The modern woman has a modern life, and most of us work. There's no time to change before we go out in the evening, so a dress should always look appropriate for day and night.

At the peak of his scientific triumphs, Newton became a 'head,' a student of the inner spiritual world - or in modern terms, a neurologician. Modern physicists do not dwell on this dramatic life-change in their hero.

Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

In too many modern churches there is no emphasis on theology at all. There is a kind of justification by works or by keeping up with modern trends anything that will drag in a few more people.

While in some countries there's a feeling that literature must stay away from religion, this is not so in India - in the Indian way, literature is just another means to find a more spiritual life, to find our way to God.

We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

In China the struggle to consolidate the socialist system, the struggle to decide whether socialism or capitalism will prevail, will still take a long historical period. However, we should all realize that the new system of socialism will unquestionably be consolidated. We can assuredly build a socialist state with modern industry, modern agriculture, and modern science and culture.

Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.

One of the things I always underscore when I teach criticism is that young critics, or would be critics, frequently have this illusion that if they write about music they're somehow part of music, or if they write about movies they're part of movies, or of they write about theater they're part of theater, or write about literature. Writing is a part of literature, we belong the species of literature. If you add all the music reviews together that have ever been written, they don't create two notes of music.

There is first the literature of KNOWLEDGE, and secondly, the literature of POWER. The function of the first is -- to teach; the function of the second is -- to move.

Literature usually begets literature.

Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! A true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.

Modern life would not be possible if it were not for chemicals, nor would modern natural gas production.

I call my design style rustically modern. I like to take traditional or rustic features and fuse it into a more modern design.

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

I think Phil Dick was particularly interesting in that, first of all, he was a very modern man and a very modern thinker, but I don't know what demons drove him.

Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.

What is the relation between Christianity and modern culture; may Christianity be maintained in a scientific age? It is this problem which modern liberalism attempts to solve.

An aspect of 'post-modern' approach to history is to include the mistakes and the prejudices of the era, without modernizing them or 'correcting' them according to our modern ideals.

The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.

I love 'Modern Family; I think that is a great show. I don't get to watch tons of TV, but when I do, 'Sons of Anarchy' is pretty much the number one, and 'Modern Family' is one of my favorites.

Modern Indian woman is not one who speaks in English or one who wears modern clothes but she is the one who has her own values, follows tradition and education to bring about a change in the society.

Stuart Blumberg is suddenly an authority on the modern - or, dare we say, post-modern - family, thanks to the critically-acclaimed debut of his new film, 'The Kids Are All Right.'

No politician can praise unemployment or inflation, and there is no way of combining high employment with stable prices that does not involve some control of income and prices. Otherwise the struggle for more consumption and more income to sustain it-a struggle that modern corporations, modern unions and modern democracy all facilitate and encourage-will drive up prices. Only heavy unemployment will then temper this upward thrust. Not many wish to confront the truth that the modern economy gives a choice only between inflation, unemployment, or controls.

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.

Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.

And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.

Fourier's theorem is not only one of the most beautiful results of modern analysis, but it may be said to furnish an indispensable instrument in the treatment of nearly every recondite question in modern physics.

A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith.

A Modern Mom to me is not always someone that juggles a career and family. A Modern Mom is a woman who takes care of herself on the inside and the outside.

I know there's similar dissatisfaction in America. There's a lot of white people who come from blue collar backgrounds and who feel ill-equipped and badly served by modern economics and the modern job market.

None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.

Even though modern life in many ways is nothing short of exhausting, we need to take responsibility for what is necessary to combat the stress and exhaustion of modern life.

Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.

Historical fiction was not - and is not - meant to supplant literature from the period it describes. As a veteran of the Crimea, Tolstoy wrote 'War and Peace' to match his own internal sense of the truth of the Napoleonic wars, to dramatize what he felt literature from that period had failed to describe.

Through the miracles of modern medicine George Burns still chases pretty girls, and through the miracle of modern psychiatry he intends to find out why!

I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.