Generation

“ There is, there must be, another conception, more lofty than this conception of progress; a conception of progress as the accumulated effort of generations. Is it not true that each generation creates forms of beauty, and discovers new truths and virtues? Can we not say that generations really do show progress, if they succeed in preserving the creations of preceding epochs, and in erecting on them as a basis more complex and elevated creations of their own? ”

“ Generation after generation of men—thousands and thousands of them—were looking at these things; they knew the hills and the clouds and the fields; the world existed for them; but you could see nothing, you were as if lying dead. ”

“ For generation would follow generation, one chubby face would give place to another, and still she would be there, plodding through the stale task, listening with an aching head to the strumming on the harpsichord, saying the same things, finding the same faults, growing slowly into a correcting, scolding, punishing machine. ”

“ SOCRATES: My answer is, that all things instrumental, remedial, material, are given to us with a view to generation, and that each generation is relative to, or for the sake of, some being or essence, and that the whole of generation is relative to the whole of essence.
PROTARCHUS: Assuredly.
SOCRATES: Then pleasure, being a generation, must surely be for the sake of some essence? ”

“ It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the Universe.
'If now an existing generation of men stand so woven together, not less indissolubly does generation with generation. Hast thou ever meditated on that word, Tradition: how we inherit not Life only, but all the garniture and form of Life; and work, and speak, and even think and feel, as our Fathers, and primeval grandfathers, from the beginning, have given it us?—Who printed thee, for example, this unpretending Volume on the Philosophy of Clothes? ”

“ Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night on Heaven's mission appears. What force and fire there is in each he expends, one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of science ”

“ Generation after generation, daring hunter, ardent discoverer, silent Indian,—all the shadowy peoples of the past have sailed its waters as we sail them, have lived perplexed and haunted by mystery as we live, have gone out into the Great Darkness with hearts full of wistful doubt and questioning, as we go ”

“ Generation to generation, breeding ever anew; and when you die, the new stock goes on. That's the meaning of eternal life. What do you get out of it? An existence innocently and properly set towards all. ”

“ For as generation and this universe are suspended from an intellectual essence; thus, also, in the orderly distribution of souls, the liberation from generation accords with the care employed by them about generation. ”

“ From generation to generation, from century to century, from age to age, as time has rolled on, there has been a gradual moving onward and upward, a steady improvement both in the refining and civilizing of man's own being and in bringing that being into sympathetic relations with the external world, that is, a gradual development of man's own powers, and an ever increasing control of the forces of nature. ”

“ Should he desire to reject it, let him do so; it will arise one generation later. Should he desire to adopt it, let him do so; it will arise one generation earlier. A generation is as one moment in heaven's eyes. Heaven is eternal. ”

“ Every generation that passes idly over the earth without adding to that progress by one degree remains uninscribed upon the register of humanity, and the succeeding generation tramples its ashes as dust.—Mazzini. ”

“ Meanwhile, this aggregation of human experiences, this compounding of age with age, one generation heaping up knowledge upon another; this begetting of knowledge by knowledge, the seed so infinitesimal, the tree now so rapidly sending forth its branches, whither does it tend? ”

“ Nature, which by one law of development evolves ideas, hypotheses, modes of inward life, and represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined by the antagonism of the new. ”

“ Generation follows generation, and the traditions from the misty past are handed down from sire to son, but for some strange reason interest in the ice-locked unknown does not abate with the receding years, either in the minds of the ignorant or the tutored. ”

“ The past, save what we discover in our generation, is our sole storehouse of materials. And a very small part of our useful knowledge in the industrial arts, in science, in social organization and administration does come from our own generation. It is the accumulated experience of generations of men. ”

“ The generation which was from fifteen to twenty years of age, at the brilliant but fleeting epoch of which I am speaking, is now between fifty-five and sixty. It will be asked whether this generation has realised the unbounded hopes which the ardent spirit of our great preceptor had conceived. ”

“ They involve generation in generation, and thus, going back from age to age, and from necessity to necessity, up to the origin of the world, they forge a close and enormous chain, which girds and binds the human race. ”

“ Thirty-three generations go to a thousand years. There are some two hundred and sixty-four or two hundred and seventy generations intervening between you and me. Each generation makes some discovery that advances civilization a stage, the next enters on the discoveries of the preceding generations, and so culture advances stage by stage. Man is infinitely progressive, the brute beast is not. ”

“ It is to the effect that the rising generation, in its reaction upon life and the splendid world which has been handed down to it, shows a distinct softening of human fibre, spiritual, intellectual, and physical, in comparison with the generations which have preceded it. ”

“ Those of each generation that have died have been inferior, or unfitted to the environment in which they found themselves. Those that have survived have been superior, superior in something—bigness, cunning, courage, virtue, vitality, strength, speed, littleness, or ferocity—something that has related them advantageously to surrounding conditions. The surviving remnant of each generation have become the progenitors of the next generation, and have transmitted, or tended to transmit, to their offspring the qualities of their superiority. ”

“ In this fact we find the truth of our Lord's words verified: "The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light." The word generation in this place means state or condition from which proceeds a given manner of life, and daily attention to business. ”

“ Nay, but we may go back not a generation or two only, but to generation beyond generation through a long series, still, as we ascend, finding the sciences fewer, earth’s load of knowledge lighter, and man’s very imagination of the physical universe which he tenants cruder and more diminutive. ”

“ I shall begin with the instruments of Generation in Men. All the parts of Generation merit the Title of noble Parts, as well as the Brain and the Heart; and some Authors give them the preference before the other Parts of the Body, upon this consideration, that they preserve the Species, and the others only keep up the Individuum. ”

“ Generation after generation of devout and holy men have looked upon it more and more as a vehicle for the profoundest truths of their religion, and have added to it, scene by scene, speech by speech, everything which in their esteem could enhance its solemnity and make clear its teaching. ”

“ This presupposes that the later generation is made up of persons of ability; otherwise, how many a later generation has lacked even so much as a drop out of the boundless ocean of knowledge that was its forbears’. ”

“ They will dwell upon it, and the generations of their children will dwell upon it, till they become sufficiently numerous to need another creation. What generation? Generations do you say, Mr. Pratt? Do you mean to say that these immortal beings are going to have posterity? ”

“ Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. ”

“ “I do not write for this generation. I am writing for other ages. If this could read me, they would burn my books, the work of my whole life. On the other hand, the generation which interprets these writings will be an educated generation; they will understand me and say: ‘Not all were asleep in the night-time of our grandparents’.” ”

“ Now there is a sense in which human nature is the same, generation after generation. But there is another sense in which human nature is undergoing constant alteration, and, indeed, it is one of the outstanding features of social life that it should be so. ”

“ There is an order at once among the circumstances of a given generation, and among the successive sets of circumstances of successive generations. ‘If we consider the development of human faculties in its results, so far as they relate to the individuals who exist at the same time on a given space, and if we follow that development from generation to generation, then we have before us the picture of the progress of the human mind. ”

“ Living the same lives generation after generation, tilling the same crops, and praying before the same stone altar in the small, quaint church, it is not to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any one of their number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. ”

“ Generation after generation of fathers and mothers patiently toiled and struggled and suffered, in the hope that they might climb just a little higher toward the sunlight of health and comfort and the [183] higher blessings of life. ”

“ The generation of our grandfathers in the opening nineteenth century had two shaping ideas, two forms of thought, the family and progress, not realizing that that very progress which had suddenly reopened the doors of opportunity for the family that had revived the ancient injunction to increase and multiply and replenish the earth, might presently close that door again and declare the world was filled. ”

“ Therefore we will set down the Generation of all Essences out of all Mothers and Beginnings, how one Generation proceeds from another, and how one is the Cause of another, and this we will do from the Eyesight of all the three Mothers. ”

“ For the earliest formation is called ‘making’ and not ‘generation.’ For ‘making’ is the original formation at God’s hands, while ‘generation’ is the succession from each other made necessary by the sentence of death imposed on us on account of the transgression. ”

“ Each generation should pass on to the next the treasures which it has inherited, beneficially modified by its own experience, and enlarged by the acquisitions which itself has gained.
Sometimes the stream of human development seems to pause and the years seem to roll on without change. ”

“ Accuse not a servant to his master, lest he curse thee, and thou fall.
30:11. There is a generation that curseth their father, and doth not bless their mother.
30:12. A generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet are not washed from their filthiness.
30:13. A generation, whose eyes are lofty, and their eyelids lifted up on high.
30:14. A generation that for teeth hath swords, and grindeth with their jaw teeth, to devour the needy from off the earth, and the poor from among men. ”

“ Each successive generation would, in this way, come and go off the stage at a fixed moment, as individuals do now. Then I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. ”

“ The multiplication of generations is signified and set forth to notice by the repetition. Are possibly two generations to be understood, as ye are aware, my beloved brethren, and as I have before explained? for there is now a generation of flesh and blood: there will be a future generation in the resurrection of the dead. ”

“ Noteworthy also, and serviceable for the progress of this same Individual, wilt thou find his subdivision into Generations. Generations are as the Days of toilsome Mankind: Death and Birth are the vesper and the matin bells, that summon Mankind to sleep, and to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the Father has made, the Son can make and enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed him. Thus all things wax, and roll onwards; Arts, Establishments, Opinions, nothing is completed, but ever completing. ”

“ So revolves the luminous orb of Life! Generations follow generations; and the Present becomes the matrix of the Future, as the Past was of the Present: the Life of one epoch forming the prelude to a higher Life. ”