Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.

Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.

Life is to blame for everything.

The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.

On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.

Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.

It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.

What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.

The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mental illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.

A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!

Layer by layer art strips life bare.

Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.

Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?

The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there something of the loose remarks I make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again.

Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.

It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument

While we have made great progress in increasing funding for veterans' benefits, we still have a long way to go in fully meeting the promise to our veterans.

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.

From the very commencement the student should set out to witness the progress and effects of sickness and ought to persevere in the daily observation of disease during the whole period of his studies.

But most Canadians have recognized to a greater or lesser extent that despite much of the so-called progress of the affluent society, essential ingredients to a meaningful life seem to be either entirely lacking, or at best, difficult to grasp.

We have stabilized our economy. We took over a very sick economy, and we were hemorrhaging 750,000 jobs a month. We have stopped the hemorrhaging. In fact, we had 140,000 job growth last month. And that's what I call progress.

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

Disapproval is a very important factor in all progress. There has really never been any progress without it.

Yearning for the seemingly impossible is the path to human progress.

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.

Why is it so painful to watch a person sink? Because there is something unnatural in it, for nature demands personal progress, evolution, and every backward step means wasted energy.

This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Life with a scientist who is often changing jobs and is frequently away at meetings and on lecture tours is not easy. Without a secure home base, I could not have made much progress.

In the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Progress, of the best kind, is comparatively slow. Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

Every step in the progress of this study has tended to obliterate the technical barriers by which logicians have sought to separate the inquiries relating to the several parts of man's nature.

Liberalism regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situation, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.

My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.

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.