Modern Life Quotes

“The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Madness

“Sometime we forget to value the small things, that inspire us more than the large! We should learn from daily than planning stupid future.”
― Vikram Roy

“A great many people, and more all the time, live their entire lives without ever once sleeping out under the stars.”
― Alan S. Kesselheim, Let Them Paddle: Coming of Age on the Water

“...we spend more time gazing at luminous screens than into the eyes of our loved ones.”
― Charlie Brooker

“Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose.”
― Michael Harris

“sometimes I hear
screaming like a child
and wake up
to find it’s me”
― Stephen Fitzsimons, Screaming In A Vacuum Jar

“Being busy is a distraction and I am sure that doing nothing, resting and sleeping are all good cures for modern life. I am not suggesting we all do nothing but sleep, however, sometimes stopping long enough to 'be' can be very powerful.”
― Joanna Runciman, The Radiant Woman's Handbook

“The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. Even when they do not panic men often sense that older ways off feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of stasis.”
― C.Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“And a sensible work strategy might be: surrender to the task but not to the taskmaster, become absorbed in the work itself but never absorb the work ethos.”
― Michael Foley, The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy

“There are so many simple things getting unnoticed in me, it makes me feel I am a robot!”
― Vikram Roy

“Y lo que, por el contrario, me sucede a mí en las raras horas de placer, lo que para mí es delicia, suceso, elevación y éxtasis, eso no lo conoce, ni lo ama, ni lo busca el mundo más que si acaso en las novelas; en la vida, lo considera una locura. Y en efecto, si el mundo tiene razón, si esta música de los cafés, estas diversiones en masa, estos hombres americanos contentos con tan poco tienen razón, entonces soy yo el que no la tiene, entonces es verdad que estoy loco, entonces soy efectivamente el lobo estepario que tantas veces me he llamado, la bestia descarriada en un mundo que le es extraño e incomprensible, que ya no encuentra ni su hogar, ni su ambiente, ni su alimento.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Although we may wish for more or strive to do better than we have, in these times it is enough to keep your soul.”
― Eric Micha'el Leventhal

“p11- when people cherish some set of values and do not feel any threat to them they experience well being

12- we are frequently told that the problems of our decade.. have shifted from the external realm of economics and now have to do with the quality of individual life.”
― C.Wright Mills

“Men like doing the chasing, not being chased. The secret is to run away slowly enough to be caught.”
― Christopher Nutall

“Modern consumer life is a form of extreme passive violence against all people.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.”
― James Agee

“People would never say, “Wow, you’re so fat, how do even you fit into a chair!” But skinniness is okay to remark upon. Worse, they often add, “You’re so lucky to be thin,” as if thinness were an accident, as if thinness were a quality you either have or you don’t. But there’s nothing accidental about thinness. Nope. Not in twenty-first-century America.”
― K.S.R. Burns, Rules for the Perpetual Diet

“Progress has not brought about universal happiness...”
― Adam Leith Gollner, The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever

“People these days can’t seem to tolerate one moment without entertainment!”
― Samuel A. Aykroyd

“Never forget that you live in an ecosystem designed to disrupt you and it will take you for a ride if you let it.”
― Michael Harris

“He remembered believing there had been a time when monsters roamed the earth. The brave hearted fought flesh-and-blood dragons instead of shadowboxing their inner demons, the sport of modern man.”
― Katherine Starbird, Reenie Gyse

“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, A Cool Breeze on the Underground

“Perhaps we now need to engineer scarcity in our communications, in our interactions, and in the things we consume. Otherwise our lives become like a Morse code transmission that's lacking breaks - a swarm of noise blanketing the valuable data beneath.”
― Michael Harris

“One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.”
― Jaron Lanier

“Goodbye grabbing the mobile every time I think about sharing something moderately observational about something I'm watching on TV with people I have and will never meet. Hello to a world where you can just do stuff, without talking about the stuff you're doing, or talking about talking about the stuff you're doing (except for this, of course, but this doesn't count).”
― Steven Baxter

“To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.”
― Alain de Botton, The News: A User's Manual

“Sam marvelled at how easily people walked off the street and into these decadent dioramas. It was spooky how easily people’s inner landscapes were expressed in enclosed booths and glittering bars. Their private nightmares slid into the moulded furniture as if it had been designed for them.”
― Guy Mankowski, How I Left the National Grid: A Post-Punk Novel

“I do wonder if the modern world creates these desperations for you. It makes you crave products you don’t want. It places its imperatives in front of religion, faith. It employs certain people for its cause. Celebrities, singers, musicians. When you conclude that the material world is disappointing you look to these figures for answers, as they sit just beyond the array. You hunt these figures down, like they are wise men. If they vanish from your life you imbue them as symbols with even greater potency. But really it is what you project onto them that’s interesting.”
― Guy Mankowski, How I Left the National Grid: A Post-Punk Novel

“On the sidewalks everyone holding either a giant coffee or a cell phone, as though a law had been declared against public displays of empty-handedness.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Damned