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.
The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new.
Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten.
Charging back and forth isn’t progress. Small but steady forward motion is.
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.
And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
We must not stint
Our necessary actions, in the fear
To cope malicious censurers.
Ye been oure lord, dooth with youre owene thyng Right as yow list.