Quotes About Progress

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

In our society, 80 percent of the adult population suffer back pain. Apparently, the progress of technology is based on progressively deteriorating backs. This is ironic, because, in our contemporary technological society, the reward for escaping from back-breaking manual labor should be freedom from such physical pain.

If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.

Good, better, best Never let it rest, Till ur good is better And better is best.

But time is short, and science is infinite...

The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue.

For the present he was outside the gates of everything, colleges included: perhaps some day he would be inside. Those palaces of light and leading; he might some day look down on the world through their panes.

Is it that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who want to progress?

the appearance of the third and youngest would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying that he had hardly as yet found the entrane to his professional groove.

Judge me by my future works.

a true narrative like time and tide must run its course and would respect no man.

More than ever he longed to be in some world where personal ambition was not the only recognized form of progress—such, perhaps, as might have been the case at some time or other in the silvery globe then shining upon him.

old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him greatly on modern

It seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers.

Children begin with detail, and learn up to the general; they begin with the contiguous, and gradually comprehend the universal. The boy seemed to have begun with the generals of life, and never to have concerned himself with the particulars.

Als er een weg is naar het Betere, vraagt dat om een onbelemmerde blik op het Ergste.

the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever — which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale.

You know what he said? Bloom said maybe he's trying to stop.

The moment a realm of intellectual activity is codifiable, it ceases to be uniquely human.

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bonds, society perishes.

But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of Nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.