Those that too much reverence the ancients, are a scorn to the moderns. [ Proverb ]

The moderns cannot reach their beauties, but can avoid their imperfections. [ Addison ]

The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest. [ Franklin ]

If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns. [ William Penn ]

Read the best authors attentively - Bacon, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Jeremy Taylor, and of moderns, Walter Scott, Bulwer, Thackeray, Ruskin, Froude; and practice constantly. [ George Rawlinson, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition. But in this respect every author is a Spartan, being more ashamed of the discovery than of the depredation. [ Colton ]

The absent one is an ideal person; those who are present seem to one another to be quite commonplace. It is a silly thing that the ideal is, as it were, ousted by the real; that may be the reason why to the moderns their ideal only manifests itself in longing. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]