Progress Quotes
Shakespeare leads, with Milton, Browning, Longfellow and the educator Horace Mann close behind. The sourced lines are Emerson’s, from English Traits (1856), that the thing done avails and not what is said about it, and Thoreau’s from Walden (1854), that our inventions are pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things.
“Heaven ne’er helps the men who will not act” is credited to Sophocles and marked misattributed. According to the notes, an anonymous verse was wrongly attached to a Sophocles fragment through a confusion in Stobaeus’s anthology. The line about the human mind progressing in spirals, credited to Madame de Staël, is flagged too.
Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.
Attempt the end, and never stand to doubt;
Nothing's so hard but search will find it out.
Look up and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend a hand!
Attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.
I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
Unselfish and noble acts are the most radiant epochs in the biography of souls.