Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 20, The Metaphysical Crossbeak (p. 289)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 564.
The Stark Munro Letters (1894)
Context: The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic man. Yet in all that time he only learned to grind his flint stones instead of chipping them. But within our father's lives what changes have there not been? The railway and the telegraph, chloroform and applied electricity. Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to more. Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.
Source: Nizam-e-Khilafat, Barakat aur hamari zimadarian, pp. 35-36
"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)
Context: In Andrew Motion's book, we have the constant sense that Larkin is somehow falling short of the cloudless emotional health enjoyed by, for instance, Andrew Motion. Also the sense, as Motion invokes his like-minded contemporaries, that Larkin is being judged by a newer, cleaner, braver, saner world. … Motion is extremely irritated by Larkin's extreme irritability. He's always complaining that Larkin is always complaining.
Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 22 (p. 263)
“The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.”
Probably a paraphrase of this line from De l’Allemagne, Pt. 3. ch. 10. "Goethe has made a remark upon the perfectability of the human mind, which is full of sagacity: It is always advancing, but in a spiral line." Not known from Goethe's works.
Misattributed
“Public opinion's always in advance of the law.”
Windows, Act I (1922)
" 2011 Election Night Victory Speech http://www.citytv.com/toronto/citynews/topic/cityvote2011/article/128732--layton-s-challenge-to-form-constructive-opposition-in-polarized-parliament." May 2, 2011
“We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.”
1:281
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)
