"Modernity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... modernity in literature there are other matters which show how strong the conservatism of the Basques really is. Thus, in dealing with the language, the only true measure of the antiquity of the race, we find that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Mr. VACHELL's play deals with conditions that still survived only a few years ago. Yet the Squire's devotion to the science of eugenics establishes its date as quite recent. It was his sole taint of modernity; and indeed where his own son's marriage was concerned he omitted to apply his scientific principles, and made a choice for him in which no regard was paid to eugenics, but only to established ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... Primrose League. But please don't imagine that all this is told in a spirit of comedy. Miss MACAULAY is, if anything, almost too dry and serious; this, and her disproportionate affection for the word "rather," a little impaired my own enjoyment of the book. It contains some happily sketched types of modernity—all of them Cambridge to the back-bone; and Eddy's final discovery (which makes the bigot), that one can't achieve anything in life without some wholesale hatreds, is genuine enough—more so than the system of card-cutting by which he settles his convictions. Miss MACAULAY ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... precision, and the glossy shawl with the long soft fringe is elegant and delightfully mundane. She raises her double gold eyeglasses, and, contracting her forehead, stares pryingly about her; and so fashionable is she, and her modernity is so picturesque, that for a moment you think of the entrance of a duchess in the first act of a piece by Augier played on ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... of the streets, busy as is no other city in the world busy when the season is on, was still in his ears, striking a familiar note in his memory, and the modernity of the elevator, the brass-buttoned boy, and the hotel itself brought back the last time he had seen Mr. Sloan, and the day he had parted from his father in that office on Wall Street. He found the Wall Street veteran grayer, much older, and more kindly, when he was ushered into ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... this time) as anything but an aid to a free play of perception. The strong and rank old Arme d'Inghilterra, in the darker street, has passed away; but its ancient rival the Aquila Nera put forth claims to modernisation, and the Grand Hotel, the still fresher flower of modernity near the gate by which you enter from the station, takes on to my present remembrance a mellowness as of all sorts of comfort, cleanliness and kindness. The particular facts, those of the visit I began here ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... is the true Huysmans, the Huysmans of A Rebours, and it is just such surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality. With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this passion for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so exclusively an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work which, being produced to please himself, and being entirely typical of himself, would be, in a way, the quintessence of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... father, whose glance thanks you for any kind word said in passing, or assumes a grieved expression by reason of some epigram, flung at the work of art, that may wound some heart behind you. A figure not to be forgotten, certainly, if ever it should occur to any painter with a passion for modernity to fix on canvas that very typical manifestation of Parisian life, the opening of an exhibition in that vast conservatory of sculpture, with its paths of yellow sand, and its immense glass roof beneath which, half-way up, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... etc., the entire evolution of Nature has been symbolized, reaching its climax in the tower, where the scheme is continued in several groups in Chester Beach's best style. The lowest of these groups shows the Primitive Age, followed above by the Middle Ages and Modernity. The great charm of this finest of all the towers in the Exposition is its wonderful rhythmic feeling. The graceful flow of line from the base toward the top is never interrupted, in spite of the many sculptural adornments used on all sides. In front of ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... the great mark of our modernity that people are always proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man will wave a cigarette instead of a stick; he will cut his pencil with a little screwing pencil-sharpener instead ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... to inflict ourselves—" He could not get Sir Richmond aside for any adequate expression of his feelings about Miss Seyffert, before the four of them were seated together at tea amidst the mediaeval modernity of the Old George smoking-room. And only then did he begin to realize the depth and extent of the engagements to which Sir Richmond ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and Dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in everything ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... first your speculation would have been more active, my dear. You would have looked into the possibility and disputed it. What has become of your modernity?" ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Nottingham lace hung from the two windows. There was a davenport between them, and, opposite, a cabinet with a looking-glass back in three arches. It was Mr. Ransome's social distinction that he had inherited this walnut-wood furniture. Modernity was represented by a brand-new overmantle in stained wood and beveled glass, with little shelves displaying Japanese vases. The wall paper turned this front parlor into a bower of gilt roses (slightly tarnished ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... has taught us, of all poses the natural pose is the most irritating. In accordance with his desire for precision, Lyly made frequent use of the short sentence. In this we have another indication of his modernity: for the short sentence, which is so characteristic of English prose style to-day, occurs more often in his work than in the writings of any of his predecessors. And, in reference to the same question of lucidity, we may notice that he was the first writer who gave special attention to the ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... right, is Monsieur d'Agreste; he has got to the bottom of things. One must keep in step with modernity—one must be fin de siecle. Comtesse, you should hunt; there is nothing like a fox or a boar to make life worth living. It's better, infinitely better, than a pursuit of hearts; a boar's ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... narrow and parochial person who wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. If (as not unfrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to correct himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head and one man one conscience, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... his bright hazel eyes seemed exactly to match it. His face had a fine warm pallor, and his under lip, which with his chin was somewhat thrust forward, was redder than the lip of a child. It was perhaps this noticeable coloring and something in his port which made him, in spite of the correct modernity of his ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... his critical friends urged him to erase proves, if proof were needed, that this weakness was not blindness, and that he was perfectly aware of the vices of his own work. The child of his time, he threw all his brilliant gifts unhesitatingly into the scale of new ideas and new fashions; his "modernity," to use a current term of the present day, is greater than that of any other ancient author of anything ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed like Jerusalem," cried the old man, with amazing fire. "The Yankee and the German and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the hoofs of oxen. But Nicaragua is not ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... with exquisite cordiality and his welcome to Amory was like a welcome unfeigned. He was clad in white of no remembered fashion, with the green gem burning on his breast, but his manner was that of one perfectly tailored and about the most cosmopolitan offices of modernity. One might have told him one's most subtly humourous story and rested certain ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Naples were shown, all exquisite in sentiment and excellent in execution. The "Silk-cocoon Carder of Quimper" has been thus noticed by De Rengis: "If I am not mistaken, Signora Margherita Pillini has also taken this road, full of modernity, but not free from great danger. Her 'Silk-cocoon Carder' is touched with great disdain for every suggestion of the old school. Rare worth—if worth it is—that a young woman should be carried by natural inclination into such ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... which, Egypt, India, and the subject countries generally had produced new generations in a state of passionate indignation and the utmost energy, activity and modernity. The governing class in Great Britain was slowly adapting itself to a new conception, of the Subject Races as waking peoples, and finding its efforts to keep the Empire together under these, strains and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... indifference to fashion of her prim, high-throated gown, she represented—frankly—everything that he thought he most approved in woman. But nothing under the starry heavens at that moment could have forced him to lead her as a partner into that dazzling maelstrom of Mode and Modernity, because she looked "so horridly eccentric and conspicuous"—compared to the girls that he thought he ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... of modernity. Even your time-forgotten paradise, Mannering, has its civilizations, then. What ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... apparent vigour and uncompromising modernity, one suspected a sub-stratum of weakness and ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... serried and mismatched and quaintly-named haunts of old provincial, of sedately passive rather than confidently eager, traffic; but this made, among us, for much harmless inquisitory life—while we were fairly assaulted, at home, by the scale and some of the striking notes of our fine modernity. The young, the agreeable (agreeable to anything), the apparently opulent M. Prosper Sauvage—wasn't it?—had not long before, unless I mistake, inherited the place as a monument of "family," quite modestly local yet propitious family, ambition; with an ample extension in the rear, and across the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... unmistakable indications that they expected great things of her husband. Two of them, musical critics both, came to dine with her and Claude one night at the St. Regis, and talked music for hours. One of them had lived in Paris, and was steeped in modernity. He was evidently much interested in Claude's personality, and after dinner, when they had all returned from the restaurant to the Heaths' ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... of this transformation in certain of his earlier works,—in "The Newly Married Couple," for example, with its delicate analysis, of a common domestic relation, or in "The Fisher Maiden," with its touch of modernity,—but from these suggestions one could hardly have prophesied the enthusiasm and the genial force with which Bjoernson was to project his personality into the controversial arena of modern life. The ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... doctrines of agreeable illusion, of games, and generally of what affords a pleasurable emotion; or of moral doctrines, where art is a symbol and an allegory of the good and the true;—is yet not able, despite its airs of modernity and its psychology, to escape the fate of the doctrine which makes of art a semi-imaginative conception of the world, like religion. The process that it describes is mythological, not aesthetic; it is a making of gods or ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... shadowy arcade, so close to the hotels (under which, indeed, you must make your way to reach one of the oldest of these hostelries, the Hotel de la Ville), is a place to which the traveller returns again and again, weary of the garish modernity that has spoiled so much of the city, far at least from the tram lines that have made of so many Italian cities a pandemonium. It is from this characteristic pathway between the little shops that one should set out to ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... composed of sailors—men home from months of watery weariness, nights of toil and darkness, maddened by the irritating charm of the music and the delicious modernity of Kate's figure and dress, looked as if they were going to precipitate themselves from the galleries. Was she not the living reality of the figures posted over the hammocks in oil-smelling cabins, the prototype of the short-skirted ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... day, no matter in what mood of merry jesting or practical modernity we set out, an hour of riding in the open air brings us back to the mystical charm of the Holy Land and beneath the spell of its memories and dreams. The wild hillsides, the flowers of the field, the shimmering ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... thing in modernity," and I handed it to her. "A hard white diamond of egregious size, it cannot fail to be a reminder of our hard business bargain, and I shall ask you to be ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... midst of their hillside ring of necessary modernity, the people of the Great City had kept their playground inviolate. Work, science, industry—all necessary. But the real business of life was pleasure. Art, music, beauty.... And I am not far from thinking that unless abused, their ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... City has lost much of its rural village character and charm, and has meanwhile acquired some ugly modernity in spots, the City's preservation ordinance, adopted in 1984, throws a protective cloak against further demolition around structures built as residences prior to 1911. Other buildings, such as churches and historic sites, are also protected by the ordinance, subject to certification by the Historical ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... so far as himself and his man were concerned, Carter could not but confess that the scene was a picturesque one, and that the very element of danger gave it a touch of piquancy. Here were himself and Carrick, fresh from the greatest shrine of modernity, after having been cast into a mediaeval dungeon, now being hauled before a trinity of gold-laced judges on a charge ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... of modernity going on along our street. Some of the old houses have been remodeled into apartments. There is an "electric shoe repairer" just round the corner. But the antique dealers and plumbers for which the street is famous still hold sway; the fine old brick pavement still collects ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley |
