Progress Quotes

We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.

~ Alan Moore

Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.

~ Thomas A. Edison

We've forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We've ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore. (“The Thing”)

~ Richard Matheson

Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

~ Boris Pasternak

The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.

~ Auguste Comte

There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.

~ Christopher Hitchens

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ Ernest Renan

An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.

~ Neal Stephenson

The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.

~ Terry Pratchett

It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be called-- were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies. You may ridicule me--I am quite willing that you should-- I am a fit subject, no doubt. But I think if you knew what I have gone through these last few years you would rather pity me. And if they knew--he nodded towards the college at which the dons were severally arriving--it is just possible they would do the same.

~ Thomas Hardy

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

~ C.s. Lewis

When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.

~ D.h. Lawrence

[Man] progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

~ George Bernard Shaw

In other words, I tasted a different drug. A drug called progress.

~ Cameron Conaway

Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.

~ John Galsworthy

Progress is something with no pity, and no purpose. It just happens. It chews up all you ever knew, and spits out things you can't understand, and the only value it seems to have is to make a few people a lot of money.

~ Spider Robinson

I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgments must be based-on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.

~ Alberto Manguel

Garret went across the street to the library. There was a hole in the sidewalk the size of a bathtub. Construction was being done, was always being done. It was the journey that mattered, Garret thought woozily, the getting-there part. The mayor, and then the president, had begun saying that. And where are we going? the mayor had asked. When will we get there? What will happen to us once we get there? He really wanted to know.

~ Tao Lin

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

~ Henry Ford

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.

~ George Monbiot

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

~ G.k. Chesterton

In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.

~ Walter De La Mare

An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.

~ Terry Eagleton

Whatever you do, be sure to do it well.

~ Andrena Sawyer

Progress is discovering what you can do without.

~ Marty Rubin

Cynicism is one of the terrible obstacles to progress.

~ Bryant Mcgill

At the very time when we have been boasting of our enlightenment and knowledge and understanding, there is this tragic breakdown in personal relationships. ... For instance, we now have to have Marriage Guidance classes. Up to this century men and women were married without this expert advice which now seems to be so essential.

~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

~ Victor Hugo

Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents, Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising, See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream.

~ Walt Whitman

There are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very man who discovered electricity, who would themselves not so long before been burned as wizards.

~ Bram Stoker

love is just a further impetus, not something that will prevent us going forward. We do not realize that those who genuinely wish us well want us to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey.

~ Paulo Coelho

We progress a step farther, in each tick of the clock

~ Ronnie Cornelisz

Jerusalem was capital of southern Israel, known then as Judah. Isn't it true that there's always a rivalry between north and south? North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Northern and Southern Ireland, Yankees and Rebels, uptown and downtown. Somebody please tell me why that is? Maybe southerners get too much sun, like Mr. Sock over there, frying his threads, and northerners don't get enough (although I hardly think northern Israel a cool spot in the shade), but southern peoples--tropical and downtown types--always seem to lean toward decadence, whereas uptown, in the north, progress is favored. Decadence and progress obviously are at odds.

~ Tom Robbins

London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!

~ E.m. Forster

That’s progress,” McIlveen

~ Tim Lebbon

The only real progress in any activity is to love it more and more.

~ Marty Rubin

The true rightist is not a man who wants to go back to this or that institution for the sake of a return; he wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and then either to restore or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it is ancient, contemporary, or even without precedent, brand new, ultramodern. Old truths can be rediscovered, entirely new ones found. The Man of the Right does not have a time-bound, but a sovereign mind.

~ Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn