Introduction<!-- pp. 3-4 --> 
The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (1921) 
Context: Science has been advancing without interruption during the last three of four hundred years; every new discovery has led to new problems and new methods of solution, and opened up new fields for exploration. Hitherto men of science have not been compelled to halt, they have always found ways to advance further. But what assurance have we that they will not come up against impassable barriers?... Take biology or astronomy. How can we be sure that some day progress may not come to a dead pause, not because knowledge is exhausted, but because our resources for investigation are exhausted... It is an assumption, which cannot be verified, that we shall not reach a point in our knowledge of nature beyond which the human intellect is unqualified to pass.
                                    
“Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond — a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art — which is art.”
Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 7
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Joseph Conrad 127
Polish-British writer 1857–1924Related quotes
                                        
                                        “Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge”, p. 57 
The Journey Home (1977) 
Source: The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West
                                    
1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)
                                        
                                        On the Hydrogen bomb in a  minority addendum http://honors.umd.edu/HONR269J/archive/GACReport491030.html (co-authored with I. I. Rabi) to an official General Advisory Committee report for the Atomic Energy Commission (30 October 1949) 
Context: Such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country... The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.
                                    
                                        
                                        Quote in his article 'Elementarism', as cited in De Stijl – Van Doesburg Issue, January 1932, pp. 17–19 
1926 – 1931
                                    
The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter I. Prehistoric Times
                                        
                                        Christian Mysticism (1899), Preface 
Context: The phase of thought or feeling which we call Mysticism has its origin in that which is the raw material of all religion, and perhaps of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings. Men have given different names to these "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things." We may call them, if we will, a sort of higher instinct, perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process; or an extension of the frontier of consciousness; or, in religious language, the voice of God speaking to us. Mysticism arises when we try to bring this higher consciousness into relation with the other contents of our minds.
                                    
                                        
                                        Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) 
Context: What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
                                    
                                
                                    “A service beyond all recompense
Weighs so heavy that it almost gives offense.”
                                
                                
                                
                                
                            
                                        
                                        Un service au-dessus de toute récompense
À force d'obliger tient presque lieu d'offense. 
Orode, Suréna (1674), act III, scene I.