Zeitgeist Quotes

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others — we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.”
― Henry Ford

“A man's shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I want to burn with the spirit of the times. I want all servants of the stage to recognize their lofty destiny. I am disturbed at my comrades' failure to rise above narrow caste interests which are alien to the interests of society at large. Yes, the theatre can play an enormous part in the transformation of the whole of existence.”
― Vsevolod Meyerhold

“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“Even the juncture in history and the zeitgeist we live in is something we choose, setting the scene for the spiritual fodder we need to grow and achieve deeper elevation of our souls.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“И пробиваясь сквозь хрусталь
многообразно однозвучный,
как сон земли благополучной,
парит на крылышках мораль”
― Nikolay Alekseyevich Zabolotsky, Николай Заболоцкий. Столбцы. Стихотворения. Поэмы

“Novelists,’ said Ivo, ‘are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties… Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actually reads novels any more, but it’s a fashionable thing to be a novelist – as long as you don’t entertain people of course. I sometimes think,’ said Ivo, his eyes like industrial diamonds, ‘that my sole virtue is, I’m the only person in London who has no intention of writing any kind of novel, ever.”
― Amanda Craig, A Vicious Circle

“Among the tastemakers and power brokers and intellectual agenda setters of late-twentieth-century America, orthodox Christianity was completely déclassé.”
― Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

“Wäre ich auf meine Muskelkraft angewiesen und ein Ringer oder Boxer geworden, so würde kein Mensch von mir verlangen, ich solle Muskelkraft für etwas Untergeordnetes ansehen. Wäre ich stark im Kopfrechnen und wäre Leiter eines großen Bureaus, so würde kein Mensch mir zumuten, die Stärke im Kopfrechnen als eine Minderwertigkeit zu verachten. Vom Dichter aber verlangt die jüngste Zeit, und manche junge Dichter verlangen es selber von sich, daß sie gerade das, was den Dichter ausmacht, die Erregbarkeit der Seele, die Fähigkeit sich zu verlieben, die Fähigkeit zu lieben und zu glühen, sich hinzugeben und in der Welt der Gefühle das Unerhörte und Übernormale zu erleben - daß sie gerade diese Stärke hassen und sich ihrer schämen und sich gegen alles wehren sollen, was "sentimental" heißen könnte. [...] Ich mache nicht mit.”
― Hermann Hesse, Die Nürnberger Reise

“Наши современники не хотят искать и потому так много разговаривают о теории познания.”
― Лев Шестов, All Things are Possible

“Фотоапарат, як і держава, не буває нейтральним.”
― John Tagg, Burden Of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories

“Якщо в ідеології є насолода, то є і ностальгія за самовдоволенністю.”
― John Tagg, Burden Of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories

“Фантазия европейца так портится с каждым веком, что в конце концов станет невозможным не быть бесконечно тонким, когда не понимаешь, о чём речь.”
― Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Vorschule der Ästhetik

“Кстати, ведь все.. выжившие или, точнее, выжитые из своих умов, выселенные, так сказать, из всех двенадцати кантовских категорий рассудка, естественно, принуждены ютиться в какой-нибудь тринадцатой категории, этакой логической боковушке, лишь кой-как прислонённой к объективно обязательному мышлению.”
― Сигизмунд Кржижановский, Воспоминания о будущем. Избранное из неизданного

“Deutschland will den politischen Winter. Wir alle lassen dieses gesellschaftliche Erfrieren zu. Es ist ein beeindruckendes Schauspiel, dem allmählichen Erkalten der eigenen Zeit beizuwohnen.”
― Philipp Ruch, Schluss mit der Geduld: Jeder kann etwas bewirken. Eine Anleitung für kompromisslose Demokraten

“Ведь слова обращаются медленнее, чем монеты”
― Сигизмунд Кржижановский, Воспоминания о будущем. Избранное из неизданного

“..and there's growing up a scientific church, wherein knowledge, and not humility, labour, and not penance and fasting, are considered essentials”
― Heckethorn Charles William, The Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries; a Comprehensive Account of Upwards of one Hundred An

“..по любимому всеми апофатическому принципу - через отрицание осмысленности их бытия - у марионеток может сложиться реальная биография”
― Максим Кантор, Хроника стрижки овец

“Liebe ist alles, was in unserem Leben unendlich ist — alles andere borgt nur unsere Zeit.”
― Laura Chouette

“One suspects that the haste with which some performers and some writers brush aside the traditional-jazz renaissance reflects their understanding of the devastating effect that an insistence on the traditional values would have upon the world of modern jazz to which they belong”
― Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now

“Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“Die Medien sind Kinder der Aufklärung – die Demokratie auch. Wendet sich der Journalismus von der Aufklärung ab, lässt er die Demokratie im Stich – auf die er angewiesen ist.”
― Roger de Weck, Die Kraft der Demokratie

“Der Geist der Zeit, von welchem jeder durch seinen einzelnen sich rein zu halten glaubt, besteht ja aus nichts als vielen einzelnen Geistern; und jeder ist früher der Schüler als der Lehrer des Jahrhunderts, wie früher ein Sohn als ein Vater; nur aber daß, weil wir die Farbe des säkularischen Geistes bloß in großen Massen spüren, jene uns aus den einzelnen Wesen, woraus sie allein zusammenfließt, verschwindet; wie ein einziges, aus dem grauen Welt-Meer geschöpftes Glas Wasser rein und hell zu sein scheint.”
― Johann Paul Friedrich Richter

“Jedermann, selbst der Heilige, ist heute mobilisiert. Gerade das habe ich vielleicht am tiefsten empfunden. Mit jeder Form, die in den Schützengräben umkommt, mit jedem Strich, jeder Metapher und jedem Gebet, das vom Stahl zermalmt wird, verliert das Ewige eine Partie. Da ich mir bewusst bin, mich nicht von meiner Zeit trennen zu können, habe ich beschlossen, eins mit ihr zu sein. Nur deshalb mache ich vom Individuum so viel Aufhebens, weil es mir lächerlich und erniedrigt erscheint. Da ich weiß, dass keine Sache siegen wird, liebe ich die verlorenen”
― Albert Camus, Der Mythos des Sisyphos

“This may seem like a strange thing to say, but these are post-9/11 fantasy. I've read post-9/11 SF already, but this is the first fantasy that had that feel fore me. I don't mea they have allegory, or even applicability. They're their own thing, not a shadow-play of our world. But they have that sensibility, in the same way that Tolkien was writing about Dark Lords in the shadow of Hitler and Stalin and Marion Zimmer Bradley was writing about Free Amazons during the seventies upswell of feminism.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“»Was machst du so, Mara?«
»Ich führe den Grunge-Look ins neue Jahrtausend.«”
― Marlen Hobrack, Schrödingers Grrrl

“These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one. Royal Society members and French Encyclopædists are in the Chariot, availing themselves whilst they may of any occasion to preach the Gospels of Reason, denouncing all that was once Magic, though too often in smirking tropes upon the Church of Rome,— visitations, bleeding statues, medical impossibilities,— no, no, far too foreign. One may be allowed an occasional Cock Lane Ghost,— otherwise, for any more in that Article, one must turn to Gothick Fictions, folded acceptably between the covers of Books.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“I don't know what happened, but in a pre-emptive strike, I'm offended on behalf of people who may have been offended even though that wasn't the intention. I'm also offended on behalf of people who may be allergic to apologies. Some people are probably offended by what I've written and I'm also offended on behalf of those people against myself.”
― Stewart Stafford