Quotes About Development

Never pupil was more humble, never pupil more obedient; thinking nothing of himself or of anything he had done or could do, his path was open to the swiftest and highest growth. It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing. The next point will be, whether he is growing at the ratio given him. The key to the whole thing is _obedience_, and nothing else.

Nobody does anything bad all at once. Wickedness needs an apprenticeship as well as more difficult trades.

Only by the reflex of other lives can he ripen his specialty, develop the idea of himself, the individuality that distinguishes him from every other.

Most of them would have nothing to do with a caterpillar, except watch it through its changes; but when at length it came from its retirement with wings, all would immediately address it as Sister Butterfly, congratulating it on its metamorphosis--for which they used a word that meant something like REPENTANCE--and evidently regarding it as something sacred.

The first thing in all progress is to leave something behind; to follow him is to leave one's self behind.

He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising.

It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.

In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.

He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life

Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.

As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the Nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired.

And in all of us there is at least a tinge of that habit of mind. In every country in the world the large army of scientists and technicians, with the rest of us panting at their heels, is marching along the road of 'progress' with the blind persistence of a column of ants.

there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly.

As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies—more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.

Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.

During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.

Therefore, I urge all men to be in the front rank of progress and not to stand still, lest they be left behind.

The Seventh Cure — Increase Thy Ability to Earn

But what a difference now.

As the months went by

La nature est éternellement jeune, belle et généreuse. Elle verse la poésie et la beauté à tous les êtres, à toutes les plantes, qu'on laisse s'y développer.