1950s, Education and the Significance of Life (1953)
“The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.”
Book II (1760), Ch. 3.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-1767)
“No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.”
Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 5 (p. 59)
Source: The Strength To Dream (1961), p. 197
Context: No artist can develop without increasing his self-knowledge; but self-knowledge supposes a certain preoccupation with the meaning of human life and the destiny of man. A definite set of beliefs — Methodist Christianity, for example — may only be a hindrance to development; but it is not more so than Beckett's refusal to think at all. Shaw says somewhere that all intelligent men must be preoccupied with either religion, politics, or sex. (He seems to attribute T. E. Lawrence's tragedy to his refusal to come to grips with any of them.) It is hard to see how an artist could hope to achieve any degree of self-knowledge without being deeply concerned with at least one of the three.
Closing words
The Naked Civil Servant (1968)
“Progress leads to confusion leads to progress and on and on without respite.”
Inward Bound : Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (1988) http://books.google.com/books?id=mREnwpAqz-YC, p. 4
Context: Progress leads to confusion leads to progress and on and on without respite. Every one of the many major advances … created sooner or later, more often sooner, new problems. These confusions, never twice the same, are not to be deplored. Rather, those who participate experience them as a privilege.
1850s, Judge For Yourselves! 1851 (1876)
