Motivational Quotes

Progress

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

- Roth, Philip

Best Quotes about Progress

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

Kraus, Karl

It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

A process which led from the amoebae to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress -- though whether the amoebae would agree with this opinion is not known.

Russell, Bertrand

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

Orwell, George

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

Chisholm, Shirley Anita

Every convenience brings its own inconveniences along with it.

Proverb

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

Picasso, Pablo

The pace of progress will accelerate so that even engineers and technical managers will find it necessary to recycle back through school after no more than ten years. In particular fast-moving technologies skills will become obsolete every five years or so.

Davies, Owen

10.

Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.

Nash, Ogden

11.

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize... the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

12.

Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.

Coolidge, Calvin

13.

I was taught that the way of progress I neither swift nor easy.

Curie, Madame Marie

14.

Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

15.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

Bachelard, Gaston

16.

Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress.

Hugo, Victor

17.

A radical is one of whom people say He goes too far. A conservative, on the other hand, is one who doesn't go far enough. Then there is the reactionary, one who doesn't go at all. All these terms are more or less objectionable, wherefore we have

Wilson, Woodrow T.

18.

Never discourage anyone...who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.

Plato

19.

Most people are in favor of progress, it's the changes they don't like.

20.

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.

Ogden Nash

21.

Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.

Kraus, Karl

22.

The simplest school boy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

Renan, Ernest

23.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

Roth, Philip

24.

Progress is mediation comes swiftly for those who try their hardest.

Pantanjali

25.

Progress is the product of human agency. Things get better because we make them better. Things go wrong when we get too comfortable, when we fail to take risks or seize opportunities.

Susan Rice

26.

Today's progress was yesterday's plan.

27.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

Santayana, George

28.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

Whitehead, Alfred North

29.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

It takes five years to design a new car in this country. Heck, we won World War II in four years.

Perot, H. Ross

31.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?

Lec, Stanislaw J.

32.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Eliot, George

33.

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back.

Lincoln, Abraham

34.

This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

35.

With every passing hour, our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.

Ferm, Ransom K.

36.

Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still.

Proverb, Chinese

37.

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

Gordimer, Nadine

38.

The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.

Kennedy, John F.

39.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

Russell Baker

40.

Time advances: facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain, and penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

41.

When a blind man carries a lame man both go forward.

Proverb, Swedish

42.

You can't say that civilization don't advance... for in every war they kill you a new way.

Rogers, Will

43.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

44.

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

Thoreau, Henry David

45.

He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still.

Colton, Charles Caleb

46.

Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.

Herzen, Alexander

47.

The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark.

Barbara Hall

48.

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.

Harris, Sidney J.

49.

Progress is the stride of God.

Hugo, Victor

50.

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart.

Chapman, John Jay