Ascent Quotes

• Every worthy act is difficult. Ascent is always difficult. Descent is easy and often slippery.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Recovery, Addiction, Easy

  Mahatma Gandhi (1984). “Collected Works”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.

  Terence McKenna

  Self, Levels, Transforming

  7 Copy quote

• Everything that rises must converge.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1969). “Building the Earth: And The Psychological Conditions of Human Unification”

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.

  Aldous Huxley

  Movement, May, Sometimes

  Aldous Huxley (1999). “Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience”, p.48, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Do not despise the bottom rungs in the ascent to greatness.

  Publilius Syrus

  Success, Recovery, New Beginnings

  10 Copy quote

• The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces - in nature, in society, in man himself.

  Leon Trotsky

  Nature, Taken, Men

  Leon Trotsky (1980). “The History of the Russian Revolution”, Anchor Foundation

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• I summon to the winding ancient stair;
  Set all your mind upon the steep ascent

  William Butler Yeats

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Mind

  William Butler Yeats (2012). “The Winding Stair and Other Poems: A Facsimile Edition”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

  Anne Michaels

  Depth, Path, Persons

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.259, Emblem Editions

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Today, peace means the ascent from simple coexistence to cooperation and common creativity among countries and nations.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Country, Peace, Mean

  Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, Green Cross International (2011). “Mikhail Gorbachev: Prophet of Change : from the Cold War to a Sustainable World”, p.53, CLAIRVIEW BOOKS

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Only your ascent is important. Once you ascend, everything is saved

  Nirmala Srivastava

  Love, Wisdom, Yoga

  6 Copy quote

• As I toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me.

  Bayard Taylor

  Olives, Deities, Heat

  Bayard Taylor (2015). “The Lands of the Saracen: Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain”, p.67, The Floating Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• My individual, psychological descent coincided, ironically, with my ascent into the public eye.

  Joni Mitchell

  Eye, Psychological, Individual

  "Midnight and Cerulean: The Joni Mitchell Blues" by Kristen Bialik, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 29, 2012.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Understanding, World, Action Not Words

  Ascent of Man (1973) ch. 3

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• A woman finds the natural lay of the land almost unconsciously; and not feeling it incumbent on her to be guide and philosopher to any successor, she takes little pains to mark the route by which she is making her ascent.

  Alice Stone Blackwell

  Success, Pain, Women

  52 Copy quote

• Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Book, School, Science

  "'The Ascent of Man' ('The Long Childhood')". Documentary TV Mini-Series, Episode 13, 1973.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

  Oliver Cromwell

  Mistake, Science, Thinking

  Letter to General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, 3 Aug. 1650 See Hand 10

  46 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Believe, Ignorance, Reality

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• As Hegel well knew, the ascent of reason has never followed a straight line.

  Paul A. Baran

  Lines, Hegel, Reason

  Paul A. Baran (1968). “Political Econ of Growth”, p.298, NYU Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Errors, Judgment, Form

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play.

  Eric Hoffer

  Men, Play, Skills

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• See that you buy the field where the Pearl is; sell all, and make a purchase of salvation. Think it not easy: for it is a steep ascent to eternal glory: many are lying dead by the way, slain with security.

  Samuel Rutherford

  Lying, Thinking, Pearls

  Samuel Rutherford (1867). “Letters of the Rev. Samuel Rutherford”, p.287

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Civilization, we shall find, like Universalism and Christianity, is anti evolutionary in its effects; it works against the laws and conditions which regulated the earlier stages of man's ascent.

  Arthur Keith

  Men, Law, Civilization

  Sir Arthur Keith (1947). “Evolution and Ethics”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it - the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Faith, Men, Thinking

  "The Ascent of Man" (Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"), 1973.

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

  James Henry Breasted

  Civilization, Firsts, Evolution

  8 Copy quote

• There is no sudden entrance into Heaven.
  Slow is the ascent by the path of Love.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Life, Heaven, Path Of Love

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2012). “Leafs On An Idle Breeze - My Inspirational Poems (Annotated Edition)”, p.1121, Jazzybee Verlag

  8 Copy quote

  Show source