Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.
quote by Marilyn Ferguson

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One of the remarkable things about my career is that it has been marked by steady, incremental progress. No sudden spikes up, and no sudden downfalls, either.
quote by Phil Hartman

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Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness.
quote by Terry Riley

Submitted by Lucian Velea
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We must present democracy as a force holding within itself the seeds of unlimited progress by the human race. By our actions we should make it clear that such a democracy is a means to a better way of life, together with a better understanding among nations. Tyranny inevitably must retire before the tremendous moral strength of the gospel of freedom and self-respect for the individual, but we have to recognize that these democratic principles do not flourish on empty stomachs, and that people turn to false promises of dictators because they are hopeless and anything promises something better than the miserable existence that they endure. However, material assistance alone is not sufficient. The most important thing for the world today in my opinion is a spiritual regeneration which would reestablish a feeling of good faith among men generally. Discouraged people are in sore need of the inspiration of great principles. Such leadership can be the rallying point against intolerance, against distrust, against that fatal insecurity that leads to war. It is to be hoped that the democratic nations can provide the necessary leadership.
quote by George Marshall

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By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may makes advances in morality, but all mankind together are making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older; so that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man, who never ceases to live and learn.
quote by Blaise Pascal

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You are slowly developing some multinationals of your own. We certainly hope that some of them will look in this direction when they look for opportunities because the progress of Southeast Asia is important to China, just as China's progress is important to us.
quote by Sellapan Ramanathan

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Its easy to have principles when you're rich. The important thing is to have principles when you're poor.
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.
quote by Abraham Pais

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Simply caring is not enough. To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws. You need both understanding and action.
quote by Hillary Clinton

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It always seems to me extreme rashness on the part of some when they want to make human abilities the measure of what nature can do. On the contrary, there is not a single effect in nature, even the least that exists, such that the most ingenious theorists can arrive at a complete understanding of it. This vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of
one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished, would recognize that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing.
quote by Galileo Galile

Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Lady of My Dreams
Let signal sparkle slip between silk sheets
And message mind which finds intentions clear,
Daily sought though thought still to appear,
Yet somehow ever present. This defeats
Our understanding, nonetheless completes
Fine-tuned intuitions hinting cheer.
Magically she’ll grace this lower sphere,
Yearned, here on Earth, seems heaven-sent. Conceits
Defeat ambitions as one rarely meets
Recall, prompts karmic. Time deletes most. Fear
Endangers fancied links that disappear.
Awakening masks dreams’ forgotten sweets.
Mayhap map heart has charted day and night
Shows sharing twins to spin soul’s true delight …
(24 October 1992 revised 31 December 2008/for previous version see below)
Lady of My Dreams
Let your sparkle slip between the sheets
And etch within my mind your message clear.
Daily sought it was, still to appear,
Yet somehow ever present. This defeats
Our understanding, nonetheless completes
Fine-tuned intuitions showing, dear,
Magically you grace this lower sphere.
You, here on Earth, seem heaven-sent. Conceits
Dreams seldom spring to life, one rarely meets
Reminders karmic. Time deletes most. Fear
Endangers fancied links that disappear
Awakening brings longing, half-forgotten sweets.
Mayhap map heart charted day and night
Shows you as twin to spin soul’s true delight …
(24 October 1992 – acrostic sonnet Lady of my dreams)
poem by Jonathan Robin

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Disapproval is a very important factor in all progress. There has really never been any progress without it.
quote by James H. Breasted

Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Now of first principles we see some by induction, some by perception, some by a certain habituation, and others too in other ways. But each set of principles we must try to investigate in the natural way, and we must take pains to state them definitely, since they have a great influence on what follows. For the beginning is thought to be more than half of the whole, and many of the questions we ask are cleared up by it.
Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics, translated by William David Ross

Submitted by Dan Costinaş
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The Amazing Wonders Of Nature
The more that I learn about Nature the less of her I know that I know
And the more that I learn of Nature the more my wonder of her does grow
One can only live in awe of her wonders she does seem amazing to me
Scarce a day goes by that in Nature a new wonder one does not see
The artists and writers are inspired by her she is one not hard to admire
And of singing our Earth Mother's praises I feel that one never could tire
I am not a student of Nature though that's something I wish I could be
Her ways I do find fascinating yet she does seem too complex for me
Since she hides from us her many secrets all in Nature is not what you think that you see
The birds and animals have their survival methods which they do guard with secrecy
The different ways of the different creatures of land and of river and sea
On the ways and the workings of Nature the experts even disagree
The more that I learn of Nature so little of her I know that I know
So marvellous and so amazing and my wonder of her only grow.
poem by Francis Duggan

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The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.
quote by Stephen King

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Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.
quote by Frank Lloyd Wright

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So why sign your name in blood for more? It seemed like a sensible arrangement for me. I didn't sell large numbers of records and the record company paid advances they rarely recouped.
quote by David Knopfler

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The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?
quote by Stephen Wolfram

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My idea here is that, inasmuch as certain cognitive tasks and principles are tied to nature's laws, these tasks and principles are indifferent to language, culture, gender, or the particular mode of information that is provided.
quote by Edward Tufte

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Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time.
quote by Karel Capek

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So sometimes the facts are good and sometimes the facts are bad, the important thing from the point of view of a principle as broad and important as freedom of speech is that the courts articulate and set forth in a very protective way what those principles are.
quote by Floyd Abrams

Submitted by Lucian Velea
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