The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. Without adventure civilization is in full decay. It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression. It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.Ĭivilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized. In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory. God makes the animals, man makes himself.Īlmost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.Īn enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.Īrt attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.Īrt flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.Īrt is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.īut you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.Ĭivilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. That’s not me.Įvery philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning. I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether. I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t. Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.įools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.įundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.įamiliar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. Ideas won’t keep something must be done about them.Įverything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it. No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it. If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude. No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. It is the business of the future to be dangerous and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
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