[…] I believe it is safe to say that the average human being begins a strange search for something very early in life, and that even the adolescent child who is just beginning to sense an evolving personality and beginning to sense the personal idiosyncracies of character and personality, is, perhaps, more affected by this inner strange desire of search than he is affected by the physiological and mental changes that are taking place. [..]
I am sure it would be a very fortunate thing for the progress of civilization, if through some magic of the mysteries of Cosmic Law, each and every one of us should suddenly find our prayers answered, our desires fulfilled, and our search ended. Not only would there be an ending of the stimulus that urges us on to achieve better, to achieve greater, but even the search for knowledge, the search to solve the mysteries, would end. Civilization would come to a standstill, and we would begin to retrograde.
The artist who is born an artist or becomes a real artist never feels satisfied with his art. I know of many, and they frankly admit that they never carved a piece, never painted a picture, never chiseled, engraved or cut in any way, a thing of their creation with which they were perfectly satisfied. […] So it is with the inventor and so it has always been with the musician. So it will always be with […] the man who is evolving cultural ethics in his business system, who is improving his merchandise, his sales methods, his advertising methods, the service he renders to his customers. […]
When we find an individual in life who feels quite satisfied, who no longer feels the urge to try and do something a little differently, who finds no criticism coming from the voice within, who finds all he has done is satisfactory--such a person, when we find him, is generally an absolute failure. If he has been a success up to the present, failure is written for his future, for the moment he feels he is in the very shadow of success or just around the corner from it, he is sure to be far from it, and walking in the wrong direction. It is this sense of possible greater service, greater power, greater accomplishment, and greater attainment, that has quickened man into real progress toward perfection.
[… ] the many ruined structures throughout Europe […] which are now in ruin beyond recognition, may have been built by men who labored under a whip, men who had no inspiration, who had no interest, no love in their work; but the lasting things throughout the world, made by men from the strange Leaning Tower of Pisa […] to the magnificent temples of learning, the temples of art, the temples of religion, the temples of science and beauty--those things were not made by slaves, but by adoring worshipers of the art on which they were working.