Successive Quotes & Sayings

We often look with indifference on the successive parts of something that, if the whole were seen together, would shake us with emotion. — Samuel Johnson

If we could know as intimately as we know our more immediate parents the long line of ancestors through whom the family spirit has passed on its way to us, we should probably become fatalists in face of the apparently overwhelming evidence that there is nothing in us that has not come to us from, or at least through, the Family. Family portrait galleries are a striking confirmation of the persistence of characteristics which ultimately govern the fortunes of successive generations. — Helen Bosanquet

But is the Mona Lisa really art? Well then, what about an undetectably perfect copy of the Mona Lisa? That comparison (however sneaky) points up the fact that it's surprisingly difficult, maybe even impossible, to view any single work in isolation and rule definitively, "This is art" or "This is craft." Striking that difference means comparing successive pieces made by the same person. In — David Bayles

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. — Carl Sagan

I wasn't always broken; we are all born pure. It is our journey that burdens us and leads us astray. Our mistakes that beat us down and cover us in guilt and shame, burying us a little more with each successive hardship. It is up to us to dig ourselves out, to come to terms with our faults, to embrace not only our imperfections but those of the ones we love, and to once again find the path we strayed from. — Madeline Sheehan

1. Symbology - The employment of various external aids to preserve and develop the religious faculty of man. 2. History - The philosophy of each religion as illustrated in the lives of divine or human teachers acknowledged by each religion. This includes mythology; for what is mythology to one race, or period, is or was history to other races or periods. Even in cases of human teachers, much of their history is taken as mythology by successive generations. 3. Philosophy - The rationale of the whole scope of each religion. 4. Mysticism - The assertion of something superior to sense-knowledge and reason which particular persons, or all persons under certain circumstances, possess; runs through the other divisions also. All — Swami Vivekananda

And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur. — Angela Carter

On hands and knees the figure comes pacing along beside the wall that flanks the patio, lithe, sinuous, knife in mouth perpendicular to its course. In moonlight and out of it, as each successive archway of the portico circles high above it, comes down to join its support, and is gone again to the rear.
The moon is a caress on supple skin. The moon of Anahuac understands, the moon is in league, the moon will not betray. ("The Moon of Montezuma") — Cornell Woolrich

The paleontological evidence before us today clearly demonstrates ordered progressive change with the successive development of new faunal and floral assemblages through the changing epochs of our earth's history. There should be no real conflict between science, which is the search for truth, and Christ's teachings, which I hold to be truth itself. It is only when scientists remove God from creation that the Christian is faced with an irreconcilable situation. — Wendell Phillips

Here is a definition which correctly reflects the course of thought and action of a grandmaster: - The plan in a game of chess is the sum total of successive strategical operations which are each carried out according to separate ideas arising from the demands of the position. — Alexander Kotov

But I could I tell her so in a way that would suggest the distinctive nature of my attraction? Words like "love" or "devotion" or "infatuation" we're exhausted by the weight of successive love stories, but the layers imposed on them through the uses of others. — Alain De Botton

The University of Cambridge, in accordance with that law of its evolution, by which, while maintaining the strictest continuity between the successive phases of its history, it adapts itself with more or less promptness to the requirements of the times, has lately instituted a course of Experimental Physics. — James Clerk Maxwell

Every day is like that, eight successive meetings on eight different topics, every one really important and interesting. — Peter Orszag

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together. — Steve Jobs

As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations. — Michael Shermer

Analytic philosophy has spent the last seventy years engaged in two successive revolts. If you didn't know this, don't feel bad -- philosophers engaged in revolt look pretty much exactly like philosophers not engaged in revolt. They go to the office, teach introduction to philosophy, make a few phone calls, have office hours, work on a rough draft, and head home. There's no storming of the parliament building, ripping up of city streets, or lobbing of Molotov cocktails for your revolting philosopher, or, I should say, the philosopher in revolt.
"Themes in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy as Reflected in the Work of Monty Python — Gary L. Hardcastle

The order of ... successive generations is indeed much more clearly proved than many a legend which has assumed the character of history in the hands of man; for the geological record is the work of God. — Roderick Murchison

Yet though time is cyclic, it is not repetitive; there is no other time within which it can repeat itself. For time is but an abstraction from the successive-ness of events that pass; and since all events whatsoever form together a cycle of successive-ness, there is nothing constant in relation to which there can be repetition. And so the succession of events is cyclic, yet not repetitive. The birth of the all-pervading gas in the so-called Beginning is not merely similar to another such birth to occur long after us and long after the cosmic End, so-called; the past Beginning is the future Beginning.

When we are in full possession of our faculties, we are not distressed by this fate. For we know that though our fair community must cease, it has also indestructible being. We have at least carved into one region of the eternal real a form which has beauty of no mean order. — Olaf Stapledon

It must not be thought, however, that in pagan Ireland Fairyland was altogether conceived as a Hades or place of the dead. We have already seen that in some of its types and aspects it was inherently nothing of the sort; as when, for example, it came to be confused with the Land of the Gods. In all likelihood these separate paradises and deadlands of a nature so various were the result of the stratified beliefs of successive races dwelling in the same region. A conquering race would scarcely credit that its heroes would, after death, betake themselves to the deadland of the beaten and enslaved aborigines. The gods of vanquished races might be conceived as presiding over spheres of the dead for which their victors would have nothing but contempt, and which, because of that very contempt, might come to be conceived as hells or places of a debased and grovelling kind, pestiferous regions which only the spirits of despised "natives" or the undesirable might inhabit. — Lewis Spence

There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being ... — James Joseph Sylvester

Successive American presidents have turned a blind eye to piles of evidence that Saudi money is being used to foment holy war against America. — Stephen Kinzer

The nihilist makes one mistake: he does not realise that other people are also nihilists, and that the nihilism of other people is now an active historical factor. He has no consciousness of the possibility of transcendence. The fact is, however, that the present reign of survival, in which all the talk about progress expresses nothing so much as the fear that progress may be impossible, is itself a product of history, is itself the outcome of all the renunciations of humanity that have been made over the centuries. Indeed, the history of survival is the historical movement which will eventually undo history itself. For clear awareness of just how nightmarish life has become is on the point of fusing with a consciousness of the successive renunciations of the past, and thus too with the real desire to pick up the movement of transcendence everywhere in space and time where it has been prematurely interrupted. — Raoul Vaneigem

Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them. — Amin Maalouf

Taken as a whole, the last four administrations represent the culmination of a century of executive abuse. With each successive president from forty-one to forty-four the disease grew worse. By the time Obama leaves office in 2017, Americans will have suffered under twenty-eight consecutive years of unconstitutional executive usurpation of power. An elected king? The British taxpayer spends around $50 million annually to support the entire royal family. With an annual budget that exceeds $1 billion for expenses, including travel, the American president supplanted the British monarch in everything but a title long ago. — Brion McClanahan

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. — Kevin Rudd

Nowadays he is best remembered for the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two, and the ratio between a number and its immediate antecedent tends towards a 'golden mean' (around 1.618). It — Niall Ferguson

The freeing of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task. — Sigmund Freud

We rise to fortune by successive steps; we descend by only one. — Stanislaw Leszczynski

The Rolling Stones are constantly changing, but beneath the changes they remain the most formal of rock bands. Their successive releases have been continuous extensions of their approach, not radical redefinitions, as has so often been the case with the Beatles. — Jon Landau

The successive series of stratified formations are piled on one another, almost like courses of masonry. — William Buckland

Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps. — Charles Darwin

The ideal of the rule of law, along with equality under the law, is one of the bases of tolerance. It means that, one way or another, governments themselves must act in accordance with the law- a responsibility they sometimes try to evade. The treatment of asylum seekers in Australia is an example, where successive Commonwealth governments have produced a series of changes to the law. In a liberal-democratic society the rule of law also means that there must be open discussion about those laws and how they are being upheld in the courts. It also means predictability- known rules about the relationship between people and governments, and in certain matters, between individuals. It is intended to mean fairness - no one should be condemned unheard, and hearings must be carried out openly by courts or tribunals as independent of governments as possible. (In their wars against asylum seekers, governments have shuffled procedures around as if they were fairground illusionists.) — Donald Horne

Generations cometh and generations passeth, but the earth abideth forever. While successive generations live and die, and all things change, man can never rest until death claims us. I choose to use my time alone to contemplate human existence, probe the human condition, and trace what it means to be one man in our modern world. There can be no profit from my labor, no lasting yield realized from this laborious and painful sojourn. We will leave everything behind. The earth shall dissolve all of our acquisitions and obliterate all traces of our petty affections. Passage of time shall alter, not annihilate the products of any artistic labors. The substance of our artistic enterprises shall continue forward in a renewed and redefined state. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. — Viktor E. Frankl

Because parents are transients in the maternity care system, there is little cumulative birth experience over successive generations of mothers. Women giving birth don't make the same mistakes as their mothers or grandmothers-they make new ones. — Elizabeth Noble

The one garment in the world with the greatest and longest popularity - over a century now - is Levi's denim blue jeans. Along with their practical durability, they show age honestly and elegantly, as successive washings fade and shrink them to perfect fit and rich texture. Ingenious techniques to simulate aging of denim come and go, but the basic indigo 501s, copper-riveted, carry on for decades. This is highly evolved design. Are there blue-jeans buildings among us? — Stewart Brand

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.
-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE — Robert Louis Stevenson

At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change. The phases of this change were numerous and successive. — Victor Hugo

Whenever we take the focus off ourselves and move it outward, we benefit. Life's most fortunate ironies are that what's best for the long run is best now, and selflessness serves our interests far better than selfishness. The wider our circle of considerations, the more stable we make the world - and the better the prospects for human experience and for all we might wish. The core message of each successive widening: we are one. The geometry of the human voyage is not linear; it's those ripples whose circles expand to encompass self, other, community, Life, and time. — Carl Safina

We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years ... We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too. — Marcel Proust

The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed. — Jacques Barzun

Even in the West, moreover, although the ethical ideal has been absolute monogamy, the legal norm has been merely relative monogamy, which is also known as successive polygamy. — J. Budziszewski

The king shall singly deliberate over secret matters; for ministers have their own ministers, and these latter some of their own; this kind of successive line of ministers tends to the disclosure of counsels. — Chanakya

Because a fact seems strange to you, you conclude that it is not one ... All science, however, commences by being strange. Science is successive. It goes from one wonder to another. It mounts by a ladder. The science of to-day would seem extravagant to the science of a former time. Ptolemy would believe Newton mad. — Victor Hugo

I should esteem it the extreme of imprudence to prolong the precarious state of our national affairs, and to expose the Union to the jeopardy of successive experiments, in the chimerical pursuit of a perfect plan. I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man. The result of the deliberations of all collective bodies must necessarily be a compound, as well of the errors and prejudices, as of the good sense and wisdom, of the individuals of whom they are composed. — Alexander Hamilton

The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,
a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,
to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, ... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. — Henry David Thoreau

The several difficulties here discussed, namely our not finding in the successive formations infinitely numerous transitional links between the many species which now exist or have existed; the sudden manner in which whole groups of species appear in our European formations; the almost entire absence, as at present known, of fossiliferous formations beneath the Silurian strata, are all undoubtedly of the gravest nature. — Charles Darwin

She watched him recede into the past as he stood ... each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever. — Salman Rushdie

Like a long black hood or so high coming down over your head, too slow to measure or even to notice. And each successive layer of the hood is only mesh, perfectly see-through...bust as they fold one over the other (over the other, over the other), your world gets more dim, dull, chill, and awful, almost beyond endurance. "Normal" getting worse, always and steadily, as "normal" is--so often--wont to do — Gemma Files

The actions of bad men produce only temporary evil, the actions of good men only temporary good ; and eventually the good and the evil altogether subside, are neutralized by subsequent generations, absorbed by the incessant movements of future ages. But the discoveries of great men never leave us; they are immortal; they contain those eternal truths which survive the shock of empires, outlive the struggles of rival creeds, and witness the decay of successive religions. — Henry Thomas Buckle

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe. — Georges Cuvier

The contents of the massive banks behind these successive revetments makes it quite clear that the material was derived from the incorporation of earlier occupation levels. — Kathleen Kenyon

In law, as in every other branch of knowledge, the truths given by induction tend to form the premises for new deductions. The lawyers and the judges of successive generations do not repeat for themselves the process of verification any more than most of us repeat the demonstrations of the truths of astronomy or physics. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit. — Aristotle.

Sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The laws of Coexistence;-the adaptation of structure to function; and to a certain extent the elucidation of natural affinities may be legitimately founded upon the examination of fully developed species;-But to obtain an insight into the laws of development,-the signification or bedeutung, of the parts of an animal body demands a patient examination of the successive stages of their development, in every group of Animals. — Richard Owen

Buddha is said to have given a "silent sermon" once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile. He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen. — Eckhart Tolle

It is an indication of Chelski's warped finances that even successive titles can be regarded as failure. Spend unprecedented sums and only unprecedented success can be commensurate. Chelski won't get the credit they think they deserve because of the money they've spent. There's £300m worth of difference between a victory and an achievement. — Pete Gill

Most other people, your wife included, with her unerring inner compass, seem to be able to get around without difficulty. They know where they are, where they have been, and where they are going, but you know nothing, you are forever lost in the moment, in the void of each successive moment that engulfs you, with no idea where true north is, since the four cardinal points do not exist for you, have never existed for you. A minor infirmity until now, with no dramatic consequences to speak of, but that doesn't mean a day won't come when you accidentally walk off the edge of a cliff. — Paul Auster

In all cases of monstrosity at birth anaesthetics should be applied by doctors publicly appointed for that purpose ... Every successive year would see fewer of the unfit born, and finally none. But, it may be urged, this is legalized infanticide. Assuredly it is; and it is urgently needed. — Tennessee Celeste Claflin

All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning
not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf. — Michel Foucault

Do the jobs you like least first. It makes each successive job easier. — Jim Henson

Oh each successive night that comes has something in it of an abandoned ember that is slowly burning out, and it falls swathed in ruins, surrounded by funereal objects. — Pablo Neruda

The profession of the law of which he [a judge] is a part is charged with the articulation and final incidence of the successive efforts towards justice; it must feel the circulation of the communal blood or it will wither and drop off, a useless member. — Learned Hand

Geology is rapidly taking its place as an introduction to the higher history of man. If the author has sought to exalt a favorite science, it has been with the desire that man-in whom geological history had its consummation, the prophecies of the successive ages their fulfilment-might better comprehend his own nobility and the true purpose of his existence. — James Dwight Dana

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,- Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; Another race the following spring supplies: They fall successive, and successive rise. — Homer

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. — Aldo Leopold

Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis. — Richard Dawkins

In order to possess "The Wonder-working Serpent," it is necessary, in the words of the Grimoire, "to buy an egg without haggling," which (by the way) indicates the class of person for and by whom the book was written. This egg is to be buried in a cemetery at midnight, and every morning at sunrise it must be watered with brandy. On the ninth day a spirit appears, and demands your purpose. You reply "I am watering my plant." This occurs on three successive days; at the midnight following the egg is dug up, and found to contain a serpent, with a cock's head. This amiable animal answers to the name of Ambrosiel. Carry it in your bosom, and your suit inevitably prospers. — Aleister Crowley

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences. — Albert Camus

The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies. — Alice Morse Earle

The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions. A good parent, a good neighbour, a good citizen, is not good because his specific goals are acceptable, but because his successive goals are ordered to a dependable and socially desirable set of values. (1947) — Gordon Allport

Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. — Simon Reynolds

We still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of successive ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction. — Charles Dickens

This is real freedom-the ability to enjoy the choices we make in every successive moment of the present. — Deepak Chopra

Actually, you are destined to reach the point where you realise that through your own desire you can consciously create your successive destinies — Neville Goddard

In France, successive waves of Gaul, Visigoth, and Frank have swept over the land and have dominated it. But the fair hair and blue eyes and the clear skin of the conquering races have been submerged by the rising and overflow of the dusky blood of the original population. — Sabine Baring-Gould

For each successive class of phenomena, a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature. — Henry John Stephen Smith

To get that word, male, out of the Constitution, cost the women of this country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign; 56 state referendum campaigns; 480 legislative campaigns to get state suffrage amendments submitted; 47 state constitutional convention campaigns; 277 state party convention campaigns; 30 national party convention campaigns to get suffrage planks in the party platforms; 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses to get the federal amendment submitted, and the final ratification campaign. — Carrie Chapman Catt

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There were two, three or four French Revolutions. Like a multi-stage rocket today, the Revolution involved several successive explosions and propellant thrusts. — Fernand Braudel

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind. — Hugo Black

The fact of a leading organ of Evangelical thought being edited for two successive fortnights from Trouville and Monte Carlo was generally admitted to have been a mistake. — Saki

Whereas representation attempts
to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
it is its own pure simulacrum. — Jean Baudrillard

An Afternoon in the Stacks
Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move. — William Stafford

The shame of the U.S.S. Liberty incident is that our sailors were treated as though they were enemies, rather than the patriots and heroes that they were. There is no other incident
beyond Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty
that shows the power of the Israeli Lobby by being able to silence successive American governments. Allowing the lies told by the Israelis and their minions in the U.S. is disheartening to all of us who are proud of our servicemen. — James Abourezk

running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing — Edith Wharton

... an ever-recurring cycle, a cycle which, repeating itself silently and ceaselessly, ensures the continuation of living matter. This cycle is constituted of the successive and repeated processes of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay. An eastern religion calls this cycle the Wheel of Life and no better name could be given to it. The revolutions of this Wheel never falter and are perfect. Death supercedes life and life rises again from what is dead and decayed. — Albert Howard

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. — Marcel Proust

What has history said of eminence without honor, wealth without wisdom, power and possessions without principle? The answer is reiterated in the overthrow of the mightiest empires of ancient times. Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome! The four successive, universal powers of the past. What and where are they? — Orson F. Whitney

The fabric of a mighty state, which has been reared by the labours of successive ages, could not be overturned by the misfortune of a single day, if the fatal power of the imagination did not exaggerate the real measure of the calamity. — Edward Gibbon

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations. — Lafcadio Hearn

Successive generations of middle-class parents used to foist their own favourite books on their children. But some time in the late Eighties it began to wane - not because children had lost interest in adorable animals but because most of it was available on useful, pacifying video. — Peter York

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject ... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them ... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. — Seneca.

I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming ... and a little mad. — Alfred North Whitehead

Our aim must be to make our successive mistakes as quickly as possible. To speed up evolution. — Karl Popper

The more extensive the revolution, the more considerable the chances of the war that it
implies. The society born of the revolution of 1789 wanted to fight for Europe. The society born of the
1917 revolution is fighting for universal dominion. Total revolution ends by demanding - we shall see
why - the control of the world. While waiting for this to happen, if happen it must, the history of man, in
one sense, is the sum total of his successive rebellions. In other words, the movement of transition which
can be clearly expressed in terms of space is only an approximation in terms of time. What was devoutly
called, in the nineteenth century, the progressive emancipation of the human race appears, from the
outside, like an uninterrupted series of rebellions, which overreach themselves and try to find their
formulation in ideas, but which have not yet reached the point of definitive revolution where everything
in heaven and on earth would be stabilized. — Albert Camus

Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time. — Marcel Proust

War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages. — Elie Ducommun

Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia I s any more than a romance - half a fiction - in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another "character" added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with "reason. — Thomas Pynchon