Get good counsel before you begin: and when you have decided, act promptly.
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.
What one has, one ought to use: and whatever he does he should do with all his might.
He who has not the spirit of his age, has all the misery of it.
If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all?