“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.”
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Henry Miller 187
American novelist 1891–1980Related quotes
Source: Practical Mysticism (1914), Chapter IX, The Third Form Of Contemplation, p. 166
Source: Economics Of The Welfare State (Fourth Edition), Chapter 15, Conclusion, p. 359
“All resistance bears within it the seeds of growth, experience, and wisdom.”
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 101
“If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all?”
A Message to Garcia (1899)
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 44
The Vocation of Man (1800), Knowledge
Pt 1, Ch. 4 http://www.resologist.net/lo104.htm
Lo! (1931)
Context: If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree can not find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as to how to become a leaf or a root. It needs no base of its own, because the relative wholeness of the plant is relative baseness to its parts. At the same time, in the midst of this theory of submergence, I do not accept that human minds are absolute nonentities, just as I do not accept that a leaf, or a root, of a plant, though so dependent upon a main body, and so clearly only a part, is absolutely without something of an individualizing touch of its own.
It is the problem of continuity-discontinuity, which perhaps I shall have to take up sometime.