Quotes about Progress

The greater the reform needed, the greater the personality you need to accomplish it.

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

Since you can't change the past, you may as well make the best of the present.

If you have not experienced the death of self, your spiritual life will have little real progress.

When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what's bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven. The great aim of modern life has been to improve the future—or even just to reach the future, assuming that the future will inevitably be "better.

All good human work remembers its history.

But time does heal. Not like we think it does, not like we would—from the front—but more from the back or side or someplace we can't see it coming. It bubbles up beneath and rises all around.

If you're riding a dead horse… dismount.

Said will be a little ahead, but done should follow at his heel.