Nineteenth Quotes
More Nineteenth Quotes
Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.
kenneth clark— Ch. 13: Degas
In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.:; Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia.:; The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked.:; In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.
george orwell— "As I Please," Tribune (12 May 1944)[14]
When I think of the thousands and thousands of pounds which have been spent by the National Art Collections Fund on the purchase of paintings some of questionable merit and dubious condition by Old Masters already represented in the National Gallery it makes me boil with rage to think that in 1905 it would not contribute one halfpenny towards the purchase for the nation of a picture by one of the Great French Masters of the late nineteenth century. It was a short-sighted policy, but the Fund's inertia and snobbish ineptitude are entirely characteristic of the habits of art-officialdom in England.
frank rutter— Rutter, Frank. Art in My Time, pp. 118–119. Rich & Cowan, London, 1933.The National Art Collections Fund is now called The Art Fund.
Proudhon was a voluntary hermit in the political world of the nineteenth century. He sought no followers, indignantly rebuffed suggestions that he had created as system of any kind, and almost certainly rejoiced in the fact that he accepted the title anarchist in virtual isolation.
George Woodcock— Prologue (Anarchism : A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962))
But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.
virginia woolf— "Women and Fiction"
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the fort changed its form from a residential town into a modern garden or empty space where only the palace and temple remained...This spatial transformation of the ort was a crucial part of a city improvement project in Mysore, which tried to beautify the capital at the same time as endeavuoring to meet modern demands of sanitation and hygiene…In this process, the modern Western idea of improvement and the traditional kingly role as a protector of dharma were somehow reconciled ad mutually strengthened.
— Aya Ikegame, in "Princely India Re-imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to ...", P.120
Anarchy had been here all the nineteenth century, with its sinister offspring Nihilism , and it is a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government , the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world . Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity; it brings out the old raiding, oppressing, murderous instincts; the rage for revenge, for power , the lust for bloodshed.
— Katherine Anne Porter, in The Never-Ending Wrong (1977)
Cotton seed oil has been in common use since the middle of the nineteenth century and achieved GRAS (Generally Recognised As Safe) status under the United States Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act because of its common use prior to 1958 (ANZFA 2002). It is used in a variety of products including edible vegetable oils and margarine , soap , and plastics .
— A.W.Frank (1987), P.7-8 (The Biology of Gossypium hirsutum L. and Gossypium barbadense L. (cotton) Version)
For the nineteenth century, the initial model of madness would be to believe oneself to be God, while for the preceding centuries it had been to deny God.
Michel Foucault— 1967 Madness and Civilization.
In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.
Brendan Gill— 1982 Quoted in Laura Rosen Top of the City: NewYork's hidden rooftop world (1990), foreword.
The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.
Germaine Greer— Chapter V: Dimension (p. 105)
Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted.
otto lilienthal— Wilbur Wright in Aero Club of America Bulletin (September 1912)
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
james a. michener— As quoted in The Observer (26 November 1989)
The nineteenth century will colonize; so, in its fantasies, did the nineteenth century soul. When Emma [Bovary] turns spendthrift and buys curtains, carpets and hangings from the draper, the information takes on something from the theme of the novel itself: the material is a symbol of the exotic, and the exotic feeds the Romantic appetite. It will lead to satiety, bankruptcy and eventually to nihilism and the final drive towards death and nothingness.
v. s pritchett— "Gustave Flaubert: The Quotidian" (p. 130)
The biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power . It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism , to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel ), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of " anarchism " (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century).
jacques ellul— The Subversion of Christianity (1986). p. 116
Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of the myth of natural harmony all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (all structures well designed for a definite purpose in this case). It is, indeed, the vision of foolish Dr. Pangloss, so vividly satirized by Voltaire in Candide the world is not necessarily good, but it is the best we could possibly have.
stephen jay gould— "Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace", p. 57
The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.
john maynard keynes— Chapter VII, pg.254
Today, like the elusive planet Vulcan in the nineteenth century, dark matter is accepted by the majority of astronomers and physicists as actually existing. Dark matter, although it has never been seen, is part of the generally accepted standard model of physics and cosmology, which also includes the big bang beginning of the universe.
john moffat— Chapter 4, Dark Matter, p. 69
The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility
josé ortega y gasset— p. 16 (History as a System (1962))
A thoughtful historian tells us that, between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, Italy produced three great men. As the first of these, he names Machiavelli , who he says, "taught the world to understand political despotism and to hate it"; as the second, he names Sarpi, who "taught the world after what manner the Holy Spirit guides the Councils of the Church"; and as the third, Galileo , who "taught the world what dogmatic theology is worth when it can be tested by science."
Andrew Dickson White— p.3 (Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915))
This whole theory [of John Law and Jean Terrasson], as dear to French financial schemers in the eighteenth century as to American " Greenbackers " in the nineteenth, had resulted, under the Orleans Regency and Louis XV, in ruin to France financially and morally, had culminated in the utter destruction of all prosperity, the rooting out of great numbers of the most important industries, and the grinding down of the working people even to starvation.
Andrew Dickson White— p.169-170 (Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915))
The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.
Alfred North Whitehead— Ch. 6: The Nineteenth Century
In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.
colin wilson— Introductory Essay, p. xiv
Most authors were led to identify the birth of scientific method with what, not by accident, is called the Scientific Renaissance, and that until the nineteenth century the civilization that gave us science was not even considered worthy of that name: it was just a "period of decadence" of Greek civilization.
— Lucio Russo, "The Erasure of the Scientific Revolution" in The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)
The contributions of these great people culminated in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in a golden era of Carnatic music. Three great composers – Thyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikhsitir, and Shayamasastry - dominated the scene, and Carnatic music reached a pinnacle in both its aesthetic and its technical aspects. P. 453
— K. R. Sundararajan, Bithika Mukerji, in Hindu spirituality: Postclassical and modern (1 January 2003), p.453
With Wordsworth , the mountains of Cumberland passed into World Literature, became, like the music of Beethoven and the paintings of Turner , symbols of the power, the vitality, the force of nature and super-nature which haunted and compelled the imagination of the nineteenth century.
— Norman Nicholson The Lake District (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1977] 1982) p. 14.
Our music has sprung from the patient, incessant, and progressive penetration into the law of resonance, that is to say, from the successive exploitation of the octave , the fifth and the fourth (ninth to twelfth century), the third (thirteenth to sixteenth century), the seventh (seventeenth and eighteenth century), the major ninth , the augmented fifth , and the perfect eleventh (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) . . . . this evolution . . . . constitutes, at the same time, the only true justification of the musical art.
— The Evolution of Music, Alfredo Casella, quoted in Miller, Horace Alden (1930). New Harmonic Devices, p.96.
The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and nineteenth Amendments could mean only one thing one person, one vote.
william o. douglas— Writing for the court, Gray v. Sanders, 372 U.S. 368, 381 (1963).
From the middle of the nineteenth Century, nearly every modern book on Logic has contained the words: Entia non sunt multiplicanda, præter necessitatem : quoted as if they were the words of William of Ockham. But nobody gives a particular reference to any work of the Singular and Invincible Doctor …:; my own fruitless inquisition for the formula, in those works of Ockham which have been printed, has led me to disbelieve that he ever used it to express his Critique of Entities.
— William M. Thorburn, in The Myth of Occam's Razor in Mind, Vol. 27 (1918), p. 345-353
