"Modernity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... styles and comforts, the inventions and luxuries, of civilization, making the laws and enforcing or compromising them, giving justice and injustice to litigants, despatching all the concomitants of modernity to littler islands. Papeete is the entrepot of all the archipelagoes in ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... remnants of Egyptian and aboriginal work—is that of the Middle Ages, the early Gothic, because that is when the art became a considerable one in Europe. It is a time of romance, of chivalry, of deep religious feeling, and yet seems like the childhood of modernity. Is it the fault of crudity in pictorial art, or the fault of romances that we look upon those distant people as more elemental than we, and thus feel for them the indulgent compassion that a child excites? However it is, theirs is to us a simple time of primitive emotion and romance, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... of the bard and the noise of feasting guests. Still the disguised Ulysses is recognized by one living object: his old dog Argo, who dies on the spot out of joy at seeing his master again. Full of sentiment and tenderness is the description; it has a modernity of touch which will be often noticed in this second half of the Odyssey. Much comment has been bestowed upon the incident; but its most striking characteristic is its symbolism. The old dog, neglected now, full of vermin, hardly able to crawl, yet loyal in his heart; ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... anyone but Isabel that night. Was she not, as the announcements had said, "of London," an ambassadress of beauty from the capital of the great queen? There was really little she could tell these clever young people, who amazed and attracted her by their reality,—the unrealities of "intensity" and "modernity" and the rest had, of course, already begun in London,—but she represented to them the sparkle of the new beauty and truth they loved. She knew little intimate anecdotes of the poets and painters they loved, piquant gossip and brilliant mots; and then she was one of those women who are like incense ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... gigantic nails and swung upon hinges which, by their careful workmanship and the nature of their grotesques, were certainly of the Renaissance. Indeed, the whole of this strange hive of mountain men was a mixture—ignorance, sharp modernity, utter reclusion: barbaric, Christian; ruinous and enduring things. The more recent houses had for the most part their dates marked above their doors. There were some of the sixteenth century, and many of the seventeenth, but the rest ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... the nations that are accounted characteristically modern, the existing establishments have been greatly altered from the mediaeval pattern, by concessive adaptation to later exigencies or by a more or less revolutionary innovation. The degree of their modernity is (conventionally) measured, roughly, by the degree in which they have departed from the mediaeval pattern. Wherever the unavoidable concessions have been shrewdly made with a view to conserving the autonomy and irresponsibility of the governmental ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Boston might easily strike him as older. Nor is London more than a little older, except in spots, such as the Tower and the Temple and the Abbey, and that little Tudor row in Holborn, all separated by vast tracts of modernity. Indeed, I would almost go farther and say that London sets up an illusion of being newer even than New York by reason of its more disturbing street traffic both in the roads and on the footways, and the prevalence of the ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... an Oxford hostel can be, for lack of modernity, provided one small oak-panelled private sitting-room, in which Holly sat to receive, white-frocked, shy, and alone, when the only guest arrived. Rather as one would touch a moth, Val took her hand. And wouldn't she wear this 'measly flower'? It would look ripping in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... came sweeping through his memory. He grew more important, and let fall the borrowed cloak of servility; his head was perched a little higher and a trifle askew as he surveyed them. The reflected grandeur of past days was on him, and in comparison modernity seemed common-place. All these brilliant, dashing, elegant men and women of his youth were gone. He was the only human echo left of their greatness, and his diminutive person grew more erect as he realized his importance as ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... necessary, try to imitate nature's own methods by using the glorious trees around you, instead of iron and tin shaped by man's hand; pause before you have murdered your natural loveliness by ghastly modernity, or you ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... dead," said Hardman, lean, eager, absolute, a fanatic of modernity. "They have been a long while dying, and this war has finished them. We see now that they are useless in the modern world. Nobody is going to waste time in studying them. Education must be direct and scientific. Train men for efficiency and prepare them for defense. Otherwise they will have no chance ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... carved it in marble, in the Bargello, but has a bronze substitute in its original niche, below which is a relief of the slaying of the dragon from Donatello's chisel. Of this glorious S. George more will be said later. But I may remark now that in its place here it instantly proves the modernity and realistic vigour of its sculptor. Fine though they be, all the other statues of this building are conventional; they carry on a tradition of religious sculpture such as Niccolo Pisano respected, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... his most caustic smile, "if you are here to sing the praises of modernity, allow me to withdraw from the duet. I venture to ask you, as I asked you this morning, one plain question. To whom is Adone Alba, to whom are my people of Ruscino, to ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... you of them; God will judge them. We pray for all those who know not what they do. But perhaps those of the other Catholic camp, the militant camp, are not entirely without sin. In the other camp they are intoxicated with the idea of modernity. Modernity is good, but the eternal is better. I fear that there they do not esteem the eternal at its just value. It is expected that the Church of Christ will derive much strength from united Catholic action ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... 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 ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... drama, though elemental, are uttered in the terms of modernity. The structure of the drama is modern, and yet there is something in the figure and movement of Rachel herself which reminds the present writer of Antigone. We do not see Antigone before the hour when she has chosen to meet the doom that man's law has decreed should she perform the task ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... men and women who have set themselves, with unavoidable theological preconceptions, it is true, to speculate upon the actual teachings and quality of Christ, have produced interpretations that have interwoven insensibly with thoughts more apparently new. There is a curious modernity about very many of Christ's recorded sayings. Revived religion has also, no doubt, been the receiver of many religious bankruptcies, of Positivism for example, which failed through its bleak abstraction and an unspiritual texture. Religion, thus restated, must, ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... was virtue, and made him a moral code, and subdued the world. Then, when you came along, stumbling through the wilderness of cast-off errors, your wise ancestor gave you a thrust that landed you in the clearing of modernity, at the same time bellowing in your ear, ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... class of information the human mind can possess, the most refined impressions it is possible to convey. Insensibly emotion crept into their intercourse, sunning itself openly and pleasantly at last when Helen's modernity was not too near. Insensibly their interest drifted from the wonderful associations about them to their more intimate and personal feelings. In a tentative way information was supplied; she spoke allusively of her school, of her examination successes, of her ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... 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 changing ideas greatly impeded by the entirely sporting spirit ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... they were as two children, the girl's mind as well as her actions, in spite of her sophistication, reflecting the artlessness of her companion. The damage that she had done, as I was afterwards to discover, was mainly by the force of suggestion. She assumed the absurd premises of modernity, drew her own preposterous conclusions and Jerry drank them in, absorbed them as he did all information, ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... himself. If you refer to a good map you will find this spot surrounded by such indications of immemorial antiquity as "Tumuli," "British Village," and the like. The Roman encampment on the other side of Davenham Minster was modernity itself, I thought, compared with this ancient haunt of the neolithic forerunners of the early Briton; this resting-place of men whose doings were a half-forgotten story many centuries before ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... little, and the girl was struck dumb with wonder that a man of such intelligence, of such a wide outlook, of such modernity, should hold to ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... in the cold light of modernity the Hutukhtu and his government cut a somewhat ridiculous figure, the reverse of the picture is the pathetic death struggle of a once glorious race. I have said that unaccustomed luxury was responsible for the decline of the Mongol Empire, ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... taint. She had lived only for herself. Conscience had awakened—but, alas! too late. She had overthrown the sordid, self-seeking habit of life; she had awakened to real womanhood; she had fought the insidious spell of modernity and she had defeated it; she had learned the thrill of taking root in new soil, the pain and joy of labor, the bliss of solitude, the promise of home and love and motherhood. But she had gathered all these marvelous things to her soul too late ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... peculiar charm, but pre-arranged design; the idea of one conception carried to its logical completion. This striking unity (despite the afterthought of the spire) certainly helps to impart an air of modernity to the building, that is lacking in far less ancient work, for oddly enough it is often the decaying features of the latest decorated style that impress the vulgar by their apparent age. The extreme care in the masonry has imparted a machine-like ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... 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 formula is ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... calendar. Bahai teaching will then escape the danger of being not quite conscious enough of its debt to the past. For we have to reconcile not only divergent races and religions, but also antiquity and (if I may use the word) modernity. I may mention that the beloved Master has deigned to call me by a new name.[Footnote: 'Spiritual Philosopher.'] He will bear with me if I venture to interpret that name in a sense favourable to ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... was very well known to Rosalie. It was exclusive and expensive; was limited to seventy girls, of whom twenty, under the age of thirteen, were received in the adapted Dower House of the ancient estate which was its home; and the last word in modernity was, in every point of administration, its first word. It had been established only eight years. The motto of its founders and of its ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... bugbear of such is "modern science," or "modern thought," a monster which, we are frequently assured, is fast devouring all the beautiful and good in human life, a Moloch fed on the dreams and ideals and noble faiths of man. Modernity! For such "modernity" has taken the place of "Anti-Christ." These sad, nervous people have no eye for the beautiful patterns and fantasies of change, none of that faith which rejoices to watch "the roaring loom of time" weaving ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... incongruities may jar The sense of fitness in a mind fastidious, Modernity has wholly failed to mar The face of Nature ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... a great new universe, teeming with vitality. Compared with the mediaevalism of her own country, the modernity of the States was a wonderful poetic drama of ideals, accomplishment, and ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... flirtation between Baron Reischach and Princess Victoria formed the theme of quite a number of the anonymous letters, in which the princess was charged with every kind of indelicacy, while the unfortunate baron was ridiculed in connection with the modernity of his nobility. Other love affairs of "poor Vicky" were likewise discussed in no friendly manner, and she was represented as being to such a degree infatuated for Count Andrassy, the eldest son of the famous Austro-Hungarian ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... now the temptation of the greatest minds. Your Shelley, your Coleridge, even your Byron,—what did they do? Menaced by this same vortex of negative effort, sentenced to intellectual annihilation if they attempted to straighten out the muddle of modernity, they fled, or drowned themselves in ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... beauties of the Italian city were intact. Modernity had not farther encroached upon the landmarks that had witnessed the birth of a new age, powerful, even violent, in its individualism. From those relics, indeed—from the massive palaces, the noble porches, the monuments ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... cossack, and by his side a diminutive groom, like Toby, "the late Beaudenord's tiger," I saw—or rather I felt its outlines engraved upon my heart by a clean and killing stab—a matchless victoria, built rather high, and hinting, through the extreme modernity of its appointments, at the forms of an earlier day, deep down in which lay negligently back Mme. Swann, her hair, now quite pale with one grey lock, girt with a narrow band of flowers, usually violets, from which floated down long veils, a lilac parasol in her hand, on her lips an ambiguous ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... twinges 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 ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... met Barry coming in, linked arm in arm with two radiant youths of his own kind and class. Musketeers of modernity, they found their adventures on the city streets, in cafes and cabarets, instead of in field and ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... with its bands of health-seeking and somewhat noisy tourists, is not the best time of the year for a visit to Land's End. As a show place it has been compelled to provide certain conveniences for the traveller, and these jarring notes of modernity are rather aggressive. There is much to be said for Mr. W. H. Hudson's plea for a national fund that shall purchase the Land's End; but one fears much water will have flowed around the historic headland before a "Society for ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... that these stories are old-fashioned both in manner and in substance. In manner they may be, but in substance I maintain they are intensely modern, alive with the spirit of our time. Any latter- day novelist might envy Crabbe his power of developing a story. It is this essential modernity that is to make Crabbe's place in English literature secure for generations ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... azaleas, was soft and flower-laden. There was a scent in it, too, as of ripe grapes, as if a fragrance lingered from vanished days when wine for the gods was made from Elephantine vineyards, and fig-trees never lost their leaves. We ourselves, and our big three-decked boat were alone in our modernity, if one forgot the line of gay buildings on the shore. Everything else might have been of the time when the world supposed Elephantine to be placed directly on the Tropic of Cancer, and believed in the magic lamp which lit the ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... the light of day, presented a wonderful spectacle. It was a mining camp positively crystallizing into being before the very eyes of all beholders. It was nearly all tents and canvas structures—a heterogeneous mixture of incompleteness and modernity to which the telegraph wires had already been strung from the outside world. It had no fair supply of water, but it did have a newspaper, issued ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... you. When a man marries a modern girl with all the trappings and the suits of modernity, he ought to be prepared ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... phases of medicine delightfully surprising in their modernity to be found here and there in many of these early Christian writers on medicine. For instance, in a compend of medicine written by one Leo, who, under the Emperor Theophilus, seems to have been a prominent physician of Byzantium (the compend was written for a young physician ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... 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 the ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... beauty and conspicuous position. Yes, if you want a characteristic glimpse of Weymouth, you cannot do better than to begin in front of this landmark, and drive down Commercial Street. Here for several smiling miles there is nothing—no ugly building large or small, no ruthless invasion of modernity to mar the mood of happy simplicity. Her beauty of beach, of sky, of river, Weymouth shares with other South Shore towns. Her perfection of idyllic ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... is 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 of a knife; and ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... batting scores he was something of a pink edition. He loved to sit in the leather armchair by Ravenel's window. And Ravenel didn't mind particularly. Sammy seemed to enjoy his talk; and then the broker's clerk was such a perfect embodiment of modernity and the day's sordid practicality that Ravenel rather liked to ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... brick structures have all been replaced by modern loft-buildings, almost as sober but far less austere. Elsewhere around the Square the old-time residences only here and there survive, encroached upon more and more by the inroads of modernity. Only along Washington Square North, east and west of Fifth Avenue, has there been consistent and effective resistance to the tidal march of progress; and it was east of the Avenue and in the immediate shadow of the New that Miss ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... 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 didn't ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... and the chapel form a group quite distinct from the Ecuries. The Cour d'Honneur is really splendid and one hardly realizes the juxtaposition of modernity. The pavilion attributed to Jean Bullant, the western facade, the ancient Petit Chateau, the Grand Vestibule, the Grand Escalier and the Gallerie des Cerfs and a dozen other apartments are of a rare and imposing beauty, ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... convinced that all religion, no matter what its antiquity or its modernity may be, is an invention of our groping earthly minds. It occurs to him that it would be interesting and proper to lay aside all theology, all creed, all the superficial trappings placed by man about his conceptions of a deity, and consider only the basic ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... example of what I say, we may find an injunction to the effect that a metaphor or a simile must be introduced from time to time, and that it must be new; but, since to the mind of the shallow-pated writer newness and modernity are identical, he proceeds forthwith to rack his brain for metaphors in the technical vocabularies of the railway, the telegraph, the steamship, and the Stock Exchange, and is proudly convinced that such metaphors must ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the Prince of 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 ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... something less than the same length of time that it was in use as a home of the sovereign, but within that period it saw two revolutions, and the change of national conditions from the comparative mediaevalism of the days of the eighth Henry to the comparative modernity of the beginning of the Hanoverian era. It is not, perhaps, overfanciful to see something of the lavish richness, the opulent homeliness, of the earlier period typified in the varied buildings, courts, ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... answered his dragoman; "I have eaten of modernity, the damndest dish that was ever set to lips. Look at those fellows," he went on, "busy as ants from nine o'clock in the morning to seven in the evening. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... the last 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 good enough to ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... Sidney's Arcadia, with its interminable sentences and confused syntax. As a modern euphuist 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 ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... the Gaiety, her fringe was curled and her pretty face rouged with the best of them. And, if further need be to show the absurdity of having called her performance 'a triumph of naturalness over the jaded spirit of modernity,' let us reflect that the little mimic was not a real old-fashioned girl after all. She had none of that restless naturalness that would seem to have characterised the girl of the early Victorian days. She had no pretty ways—no smiles nor blushes nor tremors. ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... peculiarities as were significant of their ranks and nations. As the first Reuben Vanderpoel had studied the countenances and indicative methods of the inhabitants of the new parts of the country in which it was his intention to do business, so the modernity of his descendant applied itself to observation for reasons parallel in nature though not in actual kind. As he had brought beads and firewater to bear as agents upon savages who would barter for them skins and products which might be turned into money, so she brought her nineteenth-century ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... liberality was very great, his affection for religion sound, and he turned out with both hands in pios usus." Certainly a most enlightened man for his time, and if we could only add that he recommended the milk to be sour we should have brought his modernity to the ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... admit, to fix dates, except in a few cases, relatively recent; but there is a smack of modernity in some striking devices which we can observe in operation to-day. Thus no one will dispute the statement that spiders are thoroughly terrestrial animals breathing dry air, but we have the fact ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... idyll," he said, "seems to be the sport and buffet of every one. You forget that I am of the old world. I do not understand modernity." ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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
... were its squares and narrow streets, the ancient stone houses, the many picturesque records of its great age ever, as it seemed to him, frowning with a stern and magnificent serenity amongst the tawdry evidences of later days and the irresistible march of modernity. The wine-shops of a hundred years ago flourished still side by side with the more pretentious cafes, half French, half Russian, which had sprung up like mushrooms about the city. The country-made homespuns, the glassware and metal work, heritage of generations of craftsmen, ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... and the Rome of to-day, which he knew nothing of, which he had neglected, and whose royal palace, so bare and so cold, brought him disparaging ideas—the idea of some out-of-place, bureaucratic effort, some sacrilegious attempt at modernity in an exceptional city which should have been left entirely to the dreams of the future. However, he shook off the almost painful feelings which the importunate present brought to him, and would not let his eyes rest on a pale new district, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... crimson to an agreeable old rose. Rep curtains over 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 ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Maturin retorted confidently. "If you won't talk about it, I will, I have no shame. And this girl has it—this thing I'm trying to express. She's modern to her finger tips, and yet she's extraordinarily American—in spite of her modernity, she embodies in some queer way our tradition. She loves our old houses at Silliston—they make her feel at home—that's ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that rendered him notorious and ultimately great. Thus, while his Celtic aestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... shows an art so different in its characteristics from that of Sweden that she might be at the other end of the earth. Where the Swedish artists show boldness, sometimes almost to the point of crudeness, the Dutch are intent on some degree of finish. Modernity of color is apparent, and while there are few strokes that indicate timidity, there are fine touches of the poetic in which the Hollander's heart shows its love of home and gardens. Those great tulip beds are real and luscious. Family life in the Netherlands ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... (Save, possibly, in the reticence of its advertisements! The Majestic would advertise bathrooms as a miracle of modernity, just as though common dwelling-houses had not possessed bathrooms for the past thirty years. Wilkins's had superlative bathrooms, but it said nothing about them. Wilkins's would as soon have advertised two hundred bathrooms as two hundred bolsters; and for ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Abraham's performance is that she plays the part of Deianeira neither as if that lady were a relic of the most insipid period of classical sculpture, nor yet as though she were cousin-german to Hedda Gabler. When she errs, she errs on the side of modernity; and that is as it should be. Certainly she puts too much "psychology" into the character of the fond, gentle lady, whose simple humanity at pathetic odds with Fate wins sympathy from the audience without effort or emphasis; while a hankering after the latest subtleties has led her ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... to guess her identity: one of the queens, the Aradna; frail, delicate, a blue-eyed maiden, with a waving mass of straw-gold hair hanging loosely about her shoulders. She too was classically attired, although there were touches of modernity here and there in the arrangement of ribbons; the garment matched her guards' crimson, and was draped about her shoulders so as to leave one bare, together with that arm. Across her forehead was a band of dark-blue gems, and she ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... the way in, he had printed in big letters "NO THOROUGHFARE," and was unconsciously well pleased with himself because he had done this, thinking it a proof of mature wisdom, keen insight into his brother man—especially perhaps his sister woman—and a general tendency toward scientific, bomb-proof modernity, the triumph of intellect over emotion. And in truth his experiences had been of a kind to change the enthusiastic boy he once had been into the cynical, hard-headed man he was now. Nevertheless, as he looked ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... passed away, but waxed with his years, it must not be supposed that Hake suffered from what in the “new criticism” is sweetly and appropriately called “modernity”—in other words, that vulgar greed for notoriety that in these days, when literature to be listened to must be puffed like quack medicine and patent soap, has made the atmosphere of the literary arena somewhat ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... very soul of courteous toleration, or she would resent the teasing goad of your Philistinism," cried the brother, Rivers Cutting, who in his new style yachting suit of blue cloth appeared veritably the jaunty genius of fashionable modernity, confronting the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... unbelief as a terrible evil, the fathers and mothers who subordinate instruction to education,[6335] and desire above all things to preserve the faith of their children up to adult age, now find in the ecclesiastical establishments well-run hothouses and protected against draughts of modernity. One urgent need of the first order,[6336] legitimate, deeply felt by many men and especially by women, has received satisfaction; parents who do not experience this want, place their children in the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... white product of modernity, this embodiment of civilization's perceptions and all that it pays for them, was borne at last into the primordial world ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... nor cared. All the outbuildings have been demolished and removed in order to make way for the modern spirit of commercialism which in the last decade has struck the town. It is now an ordinary church, with little but its history to redeem it from the look of smug modernity which is the ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... I said kindly, 'and naturally you think it rather queer. You mustn't let any one know. Mount Mark could never comprehend such modernity. I feel very advanced, myself. I want to spring up and shout, "Votes for Women" or "Up with the Red Flag," or "Villa Forever," or something else outspoken ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... in their minute detail. Everything in him that has a temporary character, all his digs at the critics and liberals of the period, all his critical observations with their assumption of smartness and modernity, and all the so-called profound reflections scattered here and there—how petty and naive it all is to our modern ideas! The fact of the matter is this: a novelist, an artist, ought to pass by everything that has only a temporary value. Pisemsky's ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... tricks of modernity pale before the genius of antiquity, before nervous attacks which are violent, before the Pyrrhic dance of married life! Oh! how many hopes for a lover are there in the vivacity of those convulsive movements, in the fire of those glances, in the strength of those limbs, beautiful even ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... were a succession of small rooms with low ceilings, each room perfect like so many pearls on a string. Here in America their only suitable place would be a museum, or to frame the tiny "devotional" of some precieuse Flower of Modernity. ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... person who is not persuaded that the forging of the poems was Chatterton's own, though he might have found some old stuff to work upon, which very likely was the case; but now that the poems have been so much examined, nobody (that has an ear) can get over the modernity of the modulations, and the recent cast of the ideas and phraseology, corroborated by such palpable pillage of Pope and Dryden. Still the boy remains a prodigy, by whatever means he procured or produced the edifice erected; and still It will be found inexplicable how he found time or ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... that he was in the heart of New England. No one could fail to identify the architecture of these two characteristic edifices, or of the shops whose roofs slanted toward the street; no one could mistake the speech and countenance of many a passer-by. Evidences of modernity, buildings that might have been anywhere else, were not lacking; but these huge piles of iron and stone served only to bring into sharper contrast the remnants of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... found foreshadowings 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 series of works which have come from his pen during the past thirty-five ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... 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 ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... practice the careerist religion. The careerist religion is the religion par excellence of modernity. Someone once said, with the perfect candor of the North American, that America is the land of opportunity. He meant that America is the land of the Careerist or, as it has also been put, it is the land of the man on the make. The careerist, or the man on the make, is of a thousand genera ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... thought, she looked surprisingly noble. Her large grave features made her appear like an old monument in a street of Palace Hotels; and he marvelled at the mysterious law which had brought this archaic face out of Apex City, and given to the oldest society of Europe a look of such mixed modernity. ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... incessant striving to adapt herself to her environment, that she might search its farthest nook and angle; what with ceaseless efforts to check her almost momentary impulse to cry out against the vulgar display of modernity and the vicious inequity of privilege which she saw on every hand; what with her purity of thought; her rare ideals and selfless motives; her boundless love for humanity; and her passionate desire to so live her "message" that all the world might see and light their lamps ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... strong face flushed, "but women will yet touch the rim of finer issues. Paul Goddard, who is a critic I respect, told me I had struck the right note of modernity in my prose poem." I winced at the "note of modernity," and could not help seeing the color mount to Arthur's brow when the man's ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... laughed up into the soldier's face. One of them was a boy, the other a girl. The long golden curls of the girl brushed against the soldier's cheek. The three heads bent together, almost touching. The scene was timelessly human, despite the modernity of the khaki. Joan of Arc might have been ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... writer has found this combination but seldom in France; at Lyons, Marseilles, Moulins in the Allier, and at Chatellerault in Poitou only. Modernity is making its way in France, but only in spots; its progress is steady, but as yet it has not penetrated into many outlying districts. Modern art nouveau ideas in France, which are banal enough, but which are an improvement over the Eastlake and horsehair ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... person; and she—for it is only women who willingly brave the terrors of department-stores, where most of our new books are bought nowadays—quite naturally puts it aside in favor of some keen and daring study of American life that is warranted to grip the reader. So, modernity of scene is everywhere necessitated as an essential qualification for a book's discussion at the literary evenings of the local woman's club; and modernity of scene, of course, is almost always fatal to the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... altered requirements of the day, and that the rich hues of romantic Weber—nay, even of his giantship the great Beethoven himself—are fading visibly and rapidly. Far be it from the academics to undervalue the great significance of "modernity." Our musical palette, the orchestra, has in our own time been enriched by the addition of many brilliant colors. Music has become, if possible, still more closely allied with and indebted for inspiration to each and all of the sister arts: while the peremptory and ever-increasing demand ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... ventured to call the "true German spirit." This spirit, linked to the Greeks by the noblest ties, and shown by its past history to have been steadfast and courageous, pure and lofty in its aims, its faculties qualifying it for the high task of freeing modern man from the curse of modernity—this spirit is condemned to live apart, banished from its inheritance. But when its slow, painful tones of woe resound through the desert of the present, then the overladen and gaily-decked caravan ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... problem-makers have been exorcising our not inexhaustible taste for the problematic, so that there was no very violent excitement over even the series of new "Keys" to the sonnets which came forth in the lull of the analysis of the plays; and yet, even with all the problems of modernity in view, it seems as if it must be rather by accident of oversight than for lack of interest in new developments of Shakspere-study that so little attention has been given among us to a question ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... mediaeval life and feeling. While such a criticism might reasonably be suggested by the work of some of its individual adherents, it does not touch in the least the essential principles of the school. Art cannot be said to scout modernity because it refuses to adjust itself to the every caprice of Science. The architect rather despises the mechanically perfect brick (very much to the surprise of the manufacturer); and though the camera can record more than the pencil or the brush, yet the artist is not trying to see ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... doubt whether even Mr. NORRIS himself could say offhand what its number is. Sara and her circle are eminently characteristic of their creator. You have here the same well-bred well-to-do persons, pleasantly true to their decorous type, retaining always, despite modernity of clothes and circumstance, a gentle aroma of late Victorianism. Perhaps Sara is the most immediate of Mr. NORRIS'S heroines so far. Her money-bags had been filled in Manchester, and from time to time in her history you are reminded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... "Bowdlerized" and bastard version which he printed had been copied from a manuscript written into an old book printed in 1843! What does the ink say about dates? What do the pen marks say? Great gods and little fishes! If ever I shall desire to antiquitize a modernity I'll copy it into an old book and send a transcript to that delightful Babe of the Woods of The ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... on Nissr showed fretwork carving everywhere; but the main outlines of the city, none the less, gave an impression of almost primitive severity. No touch of modernity affected it. Everything appeared ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... you going to do, Evelina?" asked Sallie, and she turned such a young, helpless, wondering face up to me from the center of her cluster of babies, that my heart almost failed me at the idea of pouring what seemed to me at that moment the poison of modernity into the calm waters of her ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... in the 'Scutcheon, and in James Lee's Wife, Browning turned for his "incidents in the development of souls" to the passion and sin-frayed lives of his own countrymen. But no halo of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the sordid modernity of the facts; the "James Lee" of this tragedy appears in person and is drawn with remorseless insistence on every mean detail which announces the "rag-and-feather hero-sham." Everything except his wit and eloquence is sham and shabby in this Club-and-Country-house villain, who violates ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... courageous bearing in a man of Bower's physical characteristics. Hitherto she had regarded him as somewhat self indulgent, a Sybarite, the product of modernity in its London aspects. His demeanor in the train, in the hotel, bespoke one accustomed to gratify the flesh, who found all the world ready to pander to his desires. Again she was conscious of that instinctive trustfulness ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... school methods, is quite good enough for him. His self-satisfaction would approach sublimity, were it not so extremely ludicrous. He has a supercilious sneer for innovations. How he can bring himself to make concessions to modernity to the extent of riding in an automobile ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... to English Catholics, 438 in antiquity— age of Pericles, 9 antiquity of liberty, modernity of despotism, 5 cause of liberty benefited more under Roman Empire than under Republic, 15 dangers of monarchy, of aristocracy and democracy, 19, 20 decline of Athenian constitution, 11 definition of liberty, 3 early ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... different time, all over the house. The house was very neat, but in odd corners there were all those odd family things that Russians collect, china of the worst period, brass trays, large candlesticks, musical boxes, anything you please. Only in the dining-room there was some attempt at modernity. Bad modern furniture, on the walls bad copies of such things as Somoff's 'Blue Lady,' Vrubel's 'Pan' and one of Benoit's 'Peter the Great' water-colours. Beyond this room the house was of eighty years ago, muffled in ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... building, had been newly painted, and in the front the window was hung with a curtain, now closely drawn, of some dark red material. The lock from the door had been removed altogether, and in its place was the aperture for a Yale latch-key. The last note of modernity was supplied by the telephone wire attached to the roof of the lifeboat shelter. He walked all round the building, seeking in vain for some other means of ingress. Then he stood for a few moments in front of the curtained window. He was a man of somewhat determined disposition, and he found himself ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... incident to the story of Cupid and Psyche, the good defenders of the bad theory of the classical origin of romance generally have based one of their few plausible arguments, need not occupy us. For the question is not whether Denis Pyramus or any one else (modernity would not be modernity if his claims were not challenged) told it, but how he told it. Still less need we treat the other question before indicated. Here is one of the central stories of the world—one of those which Eve told to her ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... of war, statecraft, moral and training of troops, stratagem, the use of spies, etc., and for twenty-five centuries it has been the bible of the Chinese or Japanese ruler. The book is distinguished alike by the poetry and grandeur of its language and the modernity of ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi |
