Quotes on Our Time

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

It is our task in our time and in our generation, to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours.

Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.

Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.

It has actually become very necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.

But do you know why we are always more just and generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time.

Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.

In our time no one has the conception of what is great. It is up to me to show them.

It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.

When we put God first, all other things fall into their proper place or drop out of our lives. Our love of the Lord will govern the claims for our affection, the demands on our time, the interests we pursue, and the order of our priorities.

Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.

Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.

We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.

Whence came I, whither go I? Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears. Science is reticent too when it is a question of the great Unity – the One of Parmenides – of which we all somehow form part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God – with a capital ‘G’. Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.

Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or to forget? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives?

There's great disparity between who goes to college and who goes to jail. Who lives long and who dies prematurely, is the defining issue of our time. And I submit to you, there's a significant race dimension, it is basically class-driven.

It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.