Topic

Development

Development in this collection is understood as a process that cannot be hurried and cannot be skipped. Aristotle on friendship-as-slow-ripening-fruit is the foundational image: the most valuable things grow on their own timeline, and impatience does not accelerate them. Washington on friendship-as-a-plant-that-must-withstand-adversity gives development its testing requirement: what has not been stress-tested has not fully developed. Montaigne on experience-needing-to-be-weighed-and-digested is the intellectual version: raw experience is not wisdom; the processing is what produces it. Goethe on nature-knowing-no-pause-in-progress is the natural-world argument: development is continuous in all things, and to stop is to invite the decay that nature attaches to inaction. Herbert on there-being-no-great-men-without-little-ones is the developmental ecology: large development depends on the cultivation of many small developments that surround it. Saint-Exupéry on life-having-meaning-only-if-bartered-daily gives development its economic metaphor: the exchange rate of growth is daily attention paid.

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Four seasons fill the measure of the year; there are four seasons in the mind of man

Source: The Human Seasons (1818)

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.

Culture means the perfect and equal development of man on all sides

Experience is not enough in itself - it has to be weighed, ordered and digested, and we have to draw the right conclusions from it

There would be no great men if there were no little ones

Libraries are not made, they grow

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter

Progress is the law of life, man is not man as yet

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age

Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.”

There are no shortcuts in evolution

We have to be creative and think of ways to make the airport more than just an airport. We need to think of ways to make it an economic-development hub

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite

A great man is one that can develop convictions in solitude and carry them out in a crowd.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.