Contemporary Life Quotes

I suppose in our contemporary lives, our cumulative e-mails might constitute a kind of diary: that informal, moment-by-moment description of life as it goes by. . As I think of those notes now - what I wrote, what I said - it seems to me they danced across the surface just as my grandmother's diaries did - Anais Nin she wasn't, and I wasn't, either. Who is? Not even Anais Nin.

I am making an Enlightenment Capsule for the audience to meditate inside - virtual reality in which people can experience ancient ideas from the East... But I'm not interested in using ancient things; rather I want to connect them with contemporary life through the technology we have now.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

The major impediment to experiencing the sacred depths of ordinary moments is the speed and distraction of contemporary life that moves to the imperatives of the global economic order.In addition, we increasingly live in a virtual world in which our reality is filtered through media and information technology.

Our contemporary life is based on information that can change at any time.

The most difficult problems are naturally not involved in the search for forms for contemporary life. It is a question of working our way to forms behind which real human values lie.

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it.

To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life -- not existing forms of dance.

All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real.

It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

No aspect of our contemporary lives has been untouched by women's work.

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia.

[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)

What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

I'm drawn to making movies about contemporary life. The reason I choose institutions is because they provide a limit, a boundary.

I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.

The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command.

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

I write about the trials and triumphs of contemporary life - and often the readers see themselves between the lines of the story.

Readers need to see themselves between the lines of the story.

The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, "enlightened" individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.

To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.

I wanted to revolutionise habits and contemporary life - to liberate nature, to free it from the authority of old theories and classicism... I felt a tremendous urge to re-create a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely mine.

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.

I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life.

Since we're living with antibiotic drugs and chlorinated water and antibacterial soap and all these factors in our contemporary lives that I'd group together as a 'war on bacteria,' if we fail to replenish [good bacteria], we won't effectively get nutrients out of the food we're eating.

But perhaps more important, as someone wishing to make a comment or two about contemporary life and values, I don't have to dig through libraries or travel to exotic lands to arrive at a view of our modern situation refracted through the lens of the preindustrial world, or the uncommercialized, unfranchised, perhaps unsanitized-and therefore supposedly more "authentic"-perspective ofthe Third World. Very simply, this is because that "other" world, as alien as if separated by centuries in time, is the one from which I came

In the creation of a garden, the architect invites the partnership of the Kingdom of Nature. In a beautiful garden the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life.

The public examination of homosexuality in our contemporary life is still so coated with distasteful moral connotations that even a reviewer is bound to wonder uneasily why he was selected to evaluate a book on the subject, and to assert defensively at the outset that he is happily married, the father of four children and the one-time adornment of his college boxing, track and tennis teams.

Artist - musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.