Action Quote by Charles Dickens

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and…

— William James

“While this book makes a similar if more modest claim for the social significance of its own fundamentally ambivalent “sentiments of disenchantment” (an ambivalence…

— Sianne Ngai

The trite objects of human efforts-possessions, superficial success, luxury-have always seemed contemptible to me.

— Albert Einstein

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of…

— Christopher Lasch

... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme…

— Ellen Glasgow

“On an individual level, the human condition changed day by day, even hour by hour, and while you were soaking in self-pity over a…

— Dean Koontz

The complaints of contemporary writes, who deplore the increase of luxury and deprevation of manners, are commonly expressive of their peculiar temper and situation.…

— Edward Gibbon

“The things sane societies loved, it hated. The things sane societies hated, it loved; the things sane societies tried to do, it tried to…

— Alice Lucy Trent

The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgust

— Samuel Beckett

“The profligacy of a man of fashion is looked upon with much less contempt and aversion, than that of a man of meaner condition.”

— Adam Smith

If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of disgust...

— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart