Famous quotes containing the words modern, set and/or theory:
“Certainly for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“What these perplexities of my uncle Toby were,—’tis impossible for you to guess;Mif you could,—I should blush ... as an author; inasmuch as I set no small store by myself upon this very account, that my reader has never yet been able to guess at any thing. And ... if I thought you was able to form the least ... conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,—I would tear it out of my book.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The weakness of the man who, when his theory works out into a flagrant contradiction of the facts, concludes “So much the worse for the facts: let them be altered,” instead of “So much the worse for my theory.””
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)