Modernity Quotes (page 19)
If grass grows and withers, it can only mean that it is part of a greater thing, which is even more real; not that the grass is less real than it looks. St. Thomas (Aquinas) has a really logical right to say, in the words of the modern mystic, A. E.: "I begin by the grass to be bound again to the Lord.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.
C. S. Lewis
There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.
C. S. Lewis
He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.
Evelyn Waugh
(From the Author Note at the beginning of the book.) Dorothy L. Sayers used to say that mystery stories were the only moral fiction of the modern world--because in a mystery, you were guaranteed to see that the bad got punished, the good got rewarded and in the end all was made right.I'd like to think that fantasy does the same thing. It reminds us that this is how it should be, and maybe if we all put our minds to it a little more, this is how it will be. The good will be rewarded. The...
Mercedes Lackey
The fascination of [Joseph Conrad’s] writing lies in a singular blending of reality with romance – he paints a world of strange skies and seas, rivers, forests, men, stranger harbours and ships, all, to our tamed understanding, touched a little by the marvelous. Beyond all modern writers he had lived romance; lived it for many years with a full unconscious pulse, the zest of a young man loving adventure, and before ever he thought to become a writer. How many talents among us are spoiled by...
John Galsworthy
Librarians are wonderful people, partly because they are, on the whole, unaware of how dangerous knowledge is. Karl Marx upended the political landscape of the twentieth century sitting at a library table. Still, modern librarians are more afraid of ingnorance than they are of the potential devastation that knowledge can bring. (p. 192)
Walter Mosley