From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.
The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.
The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.
To many moderns, [love] is something that is only a part of us rather than something of which we are a part.
It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.
Someone has said that to plagiarise from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners.
The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.
But we moderns are impatient and destructive.
In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming.
The men of the past had convictions, while we moderns have only opinions.
I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.
The moderns do not realize modernity.
If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them -- structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible.
The moderns cannot reach their beauties, but can avoid their imperfections.
