Our century is a brutal thinker. [ Beranger ]

The enigma of the nineteenth century. [ Victor Hugo ]

Arm in arm with thee, I defy the century to gainsay me. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

The philosophy of one century is the commonsense of the next. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Our century leans neither toward evil nor toward good: it goes toward mediocrity. [ A. de Gasparin ]

Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry. [ J. C. and A. W. Hare ]

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

A friendship will be young after the lapse of a century; a passion is old at the end of three months. [ Nigu ]

The costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. Sin is the only real color-element left in modern life. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

In this advanced century, a girl of sixteen knows as much as her mother, and enjoys her knowledge much more.

The affectation of virtue which characterizes this century would be very ludicrous, if it were not very tiresome. [ T. Gautier ]

Nature works very hard, and only hits the white once in a million throws. In mankind, she is contented if she yields one master in a century. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

This century boasts of progress! Have they invented a new mortal sin? Unfortunately there are but seven, as before - the number of the daily falls of a saint, which is very little. [ T. Gautier ]

Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries. [ Hawthorne ]

Love in modern times has been the tailor's best friend. Every suitor of the nineteenth century spends more than his spare cash on personal adornment. A faultless fit, a glistening hat, tight gloves, and tighter boots proclaim the imminent peril of his position. [ G. A. Sala ]

Before this century shall run out, journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light - instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremeties of the earth. [ Lamartine ]

Liberty, and not theology, is the enthusiasm of the nineteenth century. The very men who would once have been conspicuous saints are now conspicuous revolutionists, for while their heroism and disinterestedness are their own, the direction which these qualities take is determined by the pressure of the age. [ H. W. Lecky ]

Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in; the reign of quacks has not ended with the nineteenth century. The sceptre is held with a firmer grasp; the empire has a wider boundary. We are all the slaves of quackery in one shape or another. Indeed, one portion of our being is always playing the successful quack to the other. [ Carlyle ]

When the great Kepler had at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself. [ Macaulay ]

What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise. [ Whipple ]