“What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards?”
Choruses from The Rock (1934)
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T.S. Eliot 270
20th century English author 1888–1965Related quotes
“I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”
15 January, 1849. As quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë (1870), p. 285
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.
“Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.”
A Handful of Sand on the Shore, as quoted in Alterquest: the Alternative Quest for Answers (2006) by Karen Fiala, p. 127
Letter to Ernest Jones (1933), as quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews, p. 779
1930s
Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 9 (p. 300) — from the protagonist’s major speech.
“Like rowers, who advance backward.”
Book III, Ch. 1. Of Profit and Honesty
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
"Edward Witten" interview, Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1992) ed. P.C.W. Davies, Julian Brown
Context: In Newton's day the problem was to write something which was correct - he never had the problem of writing nonsense, but by the twentieth century we have a rich conceptual framework with relativity and quantum mechanics and so on. In this framework it's difficult to do things which are even internally coherent, much less correct. Actually, that's fortunate in the sense that it's one of the main tools we have in trying to make progress in physics. Physics has progressed to a domain where experiment is a little difficult... Nevertheless, the fact that we have a rich logical structure which constrains us a lot in terms of what is consistent, is one of the main reasons we are still able to make advances.