Quotes About Progress

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?

Nature's kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don't get as scared as we should.

established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.

Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment. Nietzsche

We gaan in op reusachtige, ongrijpbare collectieve projecten, zodat we ons afvragen wat we vorig jaar deden, sterker nog, waar wij zijn gebleven en wat er van ons geworden is. We zien onze verspilde krachten onder ogen tijdens het pathos van een pensioneringsfeestje.

F?r? încercare nu exist? eÈ™ec, iar f?r? eÈ™ec, umilin??.

a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream

Thus was born an astonishing new idea that governments justify their existence only by promoting possibilities for prosperity and happiness among all those they rule over.

We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers.

Ai không c?m th?y h? th?n khi nhìn l?i b?n thân n?m ngoái thì có l? ng??i Ä'ó ?? h?c không ??.

We believe, as Nietzsche put it, that 'higher is not allowed to grow out of the lower, is not allowed to have grown at all .. everything first-rate must be causa sui [the cause of itself].

Ai không c?m th?y h? th?n khi nhìn l?i b?n thân n?m ngoái thì có l? ng??i Ä'ó Ä'ã h?c không ??.

We admire New York precisely because the traffic and crowds have been coerced into a difficult but fruitful alliance.

More data flows into the building in a single day than mankind as a whole would have generated in the twenty-three centuries between the death of Socrates and the invention of the telephone.

see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the beauty of the landscape is broken up by these, for they are not yet consecrated in their reading. But the true poet sees them fall within the great order of nature not less than the beehive or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own'.

one ATM could do the work of no fewer than thirty-seven human tellers (and, into the bargain, rarely fell ill). In the United States, about half of all those employed in retail banking—some 500,000 people—lost their jobs between 1980 and 1995, thanks in large part to the invention of these silkily efficient machines.