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.
Humanity, in the aggregate, is progressing, and philanthropy looks forward hopefully.
Accuse not Nature, she hath done her part; do thou but thine.
The progress of man consists in this, that he himself arrives at the perception of truth.
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.
Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not prepared to act.
Of every noble action the intent
Is to give worth reward, vice punishment.
He is at no end of his actions blest
Whose ends will make him greatest, and not best.
Letting I dare not wait upon I would is a mug's game, and those who play it usually get mugged.