Ascent Quotes - Page 4

• I will point ye out the right path of a virtuous and noble Education; laborious indeed at first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect, and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming.

  John Milton

  Education, Path, Firsts

  John Locke, John Milton (1830). “Some thoughts concerning education”, p.275

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• Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt.

  Sally Mann

  Taken, Air, Doubt

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• I exhort you and beseech you in the bowels of Christ, faint not, weary not. There is a great necessity of heaven; ye must needs have it: all other things, as houses, lands, children, husband, friends, country, credit, health, wealth, honour, may be wanted ; but heaven is your one thing necessary, the good part that shall not be taken from you. 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, that were slain with security.

  Samuel Rutherford

  Letting Go, Country, Children

  "Joshua redivivus: or, three hundred and fifty two religious letters".

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• I was at one of the lowest points of my life when we started this film [Dream of Life], except, of course, that I had two great children. But the film is not documenting a decline; it's documenting a rise up - first baby steps and then big steps up. The worst that could have ever happened to me had already happened. And so the film is on the ascent. And I think that gives it a nice spirit.

  Patti Smith

  Dream, Baby, Children

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Brothers and sisters, I believe that there are few, even temple workers, who comprehend the full meaning and power of the temple endowment.  Seen for what it is, it is the step-by-step ascent into the Eternal Presence.  If our young people could but glimpse it, it would be the most powerful spiritual motivation of their lives.

  David O. McKay

  Spiritual, Brother, Motivation

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• There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.

  Francis Bacon

  Fashion, Truth, Discovery

  Francis Bacon (2012). “The Great Instauration”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

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• I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

  Mark Twain

  Science, Animal, Men

  Mark Twain (1973). “What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings”, p.81, Univ of California Press

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• Tracing the progress of mankind in the ascending path of civilization, and moral and intellectual culture, our fathers found that the divine ordinance of government, in every stage of the ascent, was adjustable on principles of common reason to the actual condition of a people, and always had for its objects, in the benevolent councils of the divine wisdom, the happiness, the expansion, the security, the elevation of society, and the redemption of man. They sought in vain for any title of authority of man over man, except of superior capacity and higher morality.

  William M. Evarts

  Father, Men, Divine Wisdom

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• The member of a culture ... purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized. ... He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Taken, Men, Effort

  "Ideas have Consequences". Book by Richard M. Weaver. p. 26, 1948.

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• Like all passions, anger has degrees, ascending from slight vexation through deepening clouds to rage, and finally to fury, which is a black and horrible tempest. In its mid-region, where it is neither too little to be motive nor too furious to be ungovernable, it has usefulness. For all feeling is as fuel, and where there is none life has no fire, and then no flame of ascent.

  James Vila Blake

  Anger, Passion, Fire

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• Conservatives believe government's principal functions are the preservation of freedom and removal of restraints on the individual. Liberalism's ascent in the first two-thirds of this century reflected the new belief that government should also confer capacities on individuals. Liberalism's decline in the final third of this century has reflected doubts about whether government can be good at that, or whether government that is good at that is good for the nation's character.

  George Will

  Believe, Character, Government

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• The real goal of a spiritual tradition should not be ascent, but openness, vulnerability, and this does not require great experiences but, on the contrary, very ordinary ones. Charisma is easy; presence, self-remembering, is terribly difficult, and where the real work lies.

  Morris Berman

  Spiritual, Real, Work

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• The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words) and on the main terms connecting them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best. The strategy is one of ascending to a common part of two fundamentally disparate conceptual schemes, the better to discuss the disparate foundations. No wonder it helps in philosophy.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Party

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• Again and again, faith in a possible satisfaction of the human race breaks through at the very moments of most zealous discord because humankind will never be able to live and work without this consoling delusion of its ascent into morality, without this dream of final and ultimate accord.

  Stefan Zweig

  Faith, Dream, Peace

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• What, then is our duty? It is to carefully distinguish the historic moment in which we live and to consciously assign our small energies to a specific battlefield. The more we are in phase with the current which leads the way, the more we aid man in his difficult, uncertain, danger-fraught ascent toward salvation.

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Life, Military, War

  Nikos Kazantzakis (2012). “Report to Greco”, p.578, Simon and Schuster

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• That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution -- not biological, but cultural evolution . . . "The Ascent of Man.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Men, Age, Different

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• No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent.

  Carl Jung

  Inspirational, Sunset, Eye

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• The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Life, Real, Sacrifice

  Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (Pondicherry, India), Aurobindo Ghose (1997). “Bulletin”

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• For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living.

  Edith Grossman

  Disappointment, Athlete, Adventure

  Edith Grossman (2010). “Why Translation Matters”, p.26, Yale University Press

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• The descent into matter must be complete before the ascent to spirit can commence.

  Dion Fortune

  Matter, Spirit, Descent

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• One thing is certain: the call of Christ is always a promotion. Were Christ to call a king from his throne to preach the gospel to some tribe of aborigines, that king would be elevated above anything he had known before. Any movement toward Christ is ascent, and any direction away from Him is down.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Kings, Would Be, Thrones

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• The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Kings, Powerful, Hero

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

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• Our ascent, of course, does not end the possibility for new accomplishments on El Capitan. The day will probably come when this climb will be done in five days, perhaps less; and a younger generation will make a new route on the west face.

  Royal Robbins

  Climbing, Accomplishment, Doe

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• The curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile which, disturbed from its initial state of rest, rises and then returns to a state of repose... Like a projectile flying to its goal, life ends in death. Even its ascent and its zenith are only steps and means to this goal... For, enlightenment or no enlightenment, consciousness or no consciousness, nature prepares itself for death.

  Carl Jung

  Death, Mean, Curves

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• Hope changes everything. It changes winter into summer, darkness into dawn, descent into ascent, barrenness into creativity, agony into joy.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Summer, Creativity, Winter

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