Modern Life Quotes

“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“We are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. Our culture says anything goes; fear of God is almost unheard of. We are slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.”
― Francis Chan, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God

“When you don't know where you're going, you drive on the highway.”
― Roger Hedden, Bodies, Rest and Motion.

“My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]”
― Harper Lee

“What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.”
― Edward Abbey

“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between…Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued-that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more production, or faster-paced…I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“This is the Modern Man, who cannot save himself but wants to save the world.
He is the Wise who knows not.
And his footsteps on the road click tic-tac, tic-tac”
― Cristiane Serruya, The Modern Man: A philosophical divagation about the evil banality of daily acts

“the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.”
― Roman Payne

“There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“We have become a nation of thoughtless rushers, intent on doing before thinking, and hoping what we do magically works out. If it doesn’t, we rush to do something else, something also not well thought-out, and then hope for more magic.”
― Len Holman

“When we think we're multitasking we're actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing - quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we're being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we're simply giving ourselves extra work.”
― Michael Harris

“People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh."

[Afterword]”
― Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road

“There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.[...]I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The world is only about work: work work work get get get...racing ahead...getting sacked from work...going online...knowing computer languages...winning contracts. I mean, it's just not what I would have imagined the world might be if you'd asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future.”
― Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma

“...apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953...The wonders portrayed in THE JETSONS, the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass...Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down compared to what people saw two or three generations ago.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better

“New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life”
― Frank O'Hara

“Don’t let the modern love change you too much that you forget what it is to live with kindness and compassion.

From (The Awakening)”
― Jyoti Patel

“Our modern environments are great at meeting our outer needs, but they are often conceived in a way that is hardly conducive to our inner health.”
― Thomas Lu, The Personal Sustainability Handbook: 60+ Practices to Sustainabilize Your Health, Finances, Relationships and Beyond

“Even in the age of satellites and smart cities, the wind still knows more than we do.”
― Lawrence Nault

“I don’t remember life before the internet.
For me, the ‘real world’ and the digital one were never separate. They were both home — and sometimes, both confusing. But in the middle of it all, I learned that the one thing technology can’t replace is meaning.”
― Liam Doe, I’m Nineteen, I Study Computers, and I Grew Up Online: What Teenagers Really Do on the Internet — and What Parents Need to Know

“I've built a cage around myself called "independence" and "living my best life" and "not letting anyone control me," and now I'm suffocating inside it.”
― Seethala Devi Chandu, You Are Like a Flame to Me: The Algorithm of Letting Go

“Life is Black and White,
Kinda Gray,
And nobody cares.”
― Deyth Banger, Notes Of A Dead Man Sequel

“Sex is sexy, money is sexier, spirituality is sexiest – the conscious gratification.”
― Aaron Ananth

“We don’t need more algorithms telling us what we want. We need more time to feel what we’ve forgotten.”
― Lawrence Nault