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.
Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious.
For strong souls
Live like fire-hearted suns; to spend their strength
In furthest striving action.
Those graceful acts,
Those thousand decencies that daily flow
From all her words and actions.
Action is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant
More learned than the ears.
* * * the blood more stirs
To rouse a lion, than to start a hare.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be.