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)
'Poe,' I said, 'was perhaps the first great nonstop literary drinker of the American nineteenth century. He made the indulgences of Coleridge and De Quincey seem like a bit of mischief in the kitchen with the cooking sherry.'
james thurber— Alarms and Diversions, "The Moribundant Life, or, Grow Old Along with Whom?" (1957)
When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.
Saul Bellow— "The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 60
It [ non-Euclidean geometry ] would be ranked among the most famous achievements of the entire [nineteenth] century, but up to 1860 the interest was rather slight.
ivor grattan-guinness— p. 400 (The Rainbow of Mathematics: A History of the Mathematical Sciences (2000))
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)
It is through the multitudinous mass of living human hearts, of human acts and words of love and truth, that the Christ of the first century has become the Christ of the nineteenth.
arthur penrhyn stanley— P. 103. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.
joseph beuys— p. 65 (Interview with Kate Horsefield, 1980)
Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century's "hidden hand" than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.
john james cowperthwaite— March 30, 1962, page 133.
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
Marcel Proust— Graham Greene, as quoted in Sollars, Jennings, The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel: 1900 to the Present (2008), p. v
In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.
thomas pynchon— Chapter Ten, Part II
There is today hardly any country in the world outside the communist bloc which does not have a mixed economy. In fact, even countries which call themselves socialist would object to theirs not being described as a mixed economy, for it would imply that it was a totalitarian one, while countries like Germany or Japan, usually thought of as having typically free enterprise economies, would do the same; for, otherwise, it would imply that theirs was a nineteenth century laissez-faire economy.
j. r. d. tata— Address on 'Why a Mixed Economy?' to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, New Delhi, April 4, 1975.
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))
The Conservative Party is the parent of trade unionism, just as it is the author of the Factory Acts. At every stage in the history of the nineteenth century it is to Toryism that trade unionism has looked for help and support against the oppressions of the Manchester School of liberalism, which cared nothing for the interests of the state, and regarded men as brute beasts whose labour could be bought and sold at the cheapest price, irrespective of all other considerations.
— F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, "Industrial Unrest" in Unionist Policy and Other Essays (1913)
Perhaps the best testimony to the effectiveness of the reforms of 1852 is the fact, that men of a slightly later generation, familiar with the working of the courts half a century after, find it difficult to believe that such abuses as are plainly described by the legislation of that year, should really have existed in the middle of the nineteenth century.
— Chapter XIX, Modern Civil Procedure, p. 360
All of the technical innovations that formed the basis of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries were made by men who can best be described as craftsmen, artisans, or engineers. Few of them were university educated, and all of them achieved their results without the benefit of scientific theory. Nonetheless, given the technical nature of the inventions, a persistent legend arose that the originators must have been counseled by the great figures of the Scientific Revolution.
— James Edward McClellan III, Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction (2006)
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)
In the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century Spinoza even became the secular saint of a kind of mystical pantheist deism for authors like Goethe, Schelling, and Coleridge.
— Aaron V. Garrett, Meaning in Spinoza's Method (2003), p. 2.
...the effeminacy of the inhabitants of Bengal not only became more widespread and virulent , but also acquired a more specific meaning in the late nineteenth century sterotype of the ‘effeminate Bengali babu .’ If in the past effeminacy loosely characterized all the inhabitants of Bengal, in the second half of the century it was used quite specifically to characterize the Indian middle class, or a section of this class identified as babus . In Bengal itself, therefore, effeminacy came to be associated with a small percentage of the total population.
— Lord Maculey, in Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'manly Englishman' and The' Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester University Press, 1 January 1995, p.16
If the orthodoxy of Augustine had remained the teaching of the Church, the final establishment of Evolution would have come far earlier than it did, certainly during the eighteenth instead of the nineteenth century, and the bitter controversy over this truth of Nature would never have arisen.
henry fairfield osborn— Henry Fairfield Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin (1894)
It is now clear that with the renewed great game, there are more players and more rivalry than it was during the game being played out between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In that game there was one winner and one loser. The stakes for which the game is now being played are global supremacy, energy, geo-political security, religion and financial control.
— Asgar Mitha, G. (3 September 2008), The Last Great Game
