Quotes about Progress

Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challanges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful. —Mark Victor Hansen

The love of work is the secret to personal progress, productivity, and fulfillment because work encourages the release of potential, and potential is the abundance of talents, abilities, and capabilities given to every person.

Whenever we use our time to do things that neither release our potential nor help us progress toward the accomplishment of our purpose, we forfeit or delay the opportunity to reach the excellency and completion God intended for our lives.

Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.

If we thought that because we now lived in the 'modern world' we were exempt—that our science and technology had now produced 'progress' that would eliminate all such things—we were obviously wrong. Just like those at the end of the nineteenth century who thought that Western society was now advancing smoothly towards the Kingdom of God. So, throughout Church history, Jesus' followers have usually avoided such lines of thought.

The myth of progress fails because it doesn't in fact work; because it would never solve evil retrospectively; and because it underestimates the nature and power of evil itself and thus fails to see the vital importance of the cross, God's no to evil, which then opens the door to his yes to creation.

Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient.

That is why the relentlessly modernist and progressivist projects that the politicians feel obliged to offer us ("vote for us and things will get better!") have to be dressed up with the relentlessly postmodernist techniques of spin and hype: in the absence of real hope, all that is left is feelings. Persuasion will not work because we're never going to believe it. What we appear to need, and therefore what people give us, is entertainment.

Paul does of course want the young Christians to develop to the point where, as mature followers of Jesus Christ, they will gradually find that the Christian habits of heart and life "come naturally." But to get to that point they must learn

One of the great New Testament words is Now. That was then, this is now.

To the Greeks, this was not spiritual progress; it was regress. Why would anyone want to come back to the material world, the realm of evil and corruption? The whole idea was utter foolishness to the Greeks (1 Cor. 1:23 KJV).

Action is the real measure of intelligence.