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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.

Random quote on Progress

Most quoted on progress:

Not always actions show the man; we find
Who does a kindness is not therefore kind.

Alexander Pope

The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.

Ralph Waldo Emerson English Traits (1856)

Unlike Hegel’s progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically.

John Carroll Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)

A good man deliberating which of several actions proposed he shall choose, regards and compares the material goodness of them, and then is determined by his moral sense invariably preferring that which appears most conducive to the happiness and virtue of mankind.

Francis Hutcheson A System of Moral Philosophy (1755)

people cannot take action if they don't have accurate information.

Amy Goodman The Exception to the Rulers written with David Goodman (2004)

Let thy mind still be bent, still plotting, where,
And when, and how thy business may be done.
Slackness breeds worms; but the sure traveller,
Though he alights sometimes still goeth on.

George Herbert The Temple (1633)

Either you pursue or push, O Sisyphus, the stone destined to keep rolling.

Ovid

What follows I flee; what flees I ever pursue.

Ovid

If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

Hannah Arendt The Life of the Mind (1971)

Be thy best thoughts to work divine addressed;
Do something — do it soon — will all thy might;
An angel's wing would droop if long at rest,
And God Himself inactive were no longer blessed.

Carlos Wilcox

With useless endeavour
Forever, forever,
Is Sisyphus rolling
His stone up the mountain!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Masque of Pandora (1875)

He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene.

Andrew Marvell An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland (1650)

Rightness expresses of actions, what straightness does of lines; and there can no more be two kinds of right action than there can be two kinds of straight line.

Herbert Spencer

That in our proper motion we ascend
Up to our native seat; descent and fall
To us is adverse.

John Milton

The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies.

Buckminster Fuller Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

But man, being, as I have said, essentially an active being, he must find in activity his joy, as well as his duty and glory. And labor, like everything else that is good, is its own exceeding great reward.

Edwin Percy Whipple

The essential elements of giving are power and love — activity and affection — and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other.

Mark Hopkins Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time.

Henry Ward Beecher

He who moves not forward goes backward!
A capital saying!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Press on!—"for in the grave there is no work
And no device"—Press on! while yet ye may!

Nathaniel Parker Willis a poem delivered at Yale College (1827)

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