Quotes about Development

When you do your work better To-day than Yesterday you realize your genuine Capacity and know that there is no actual Perfection except the Perfection of doing better To-day than Yesterday.

Failure is never fatal. But failure to change can and might be.

Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.

It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.

We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!

Whatever you do repeatedly," he writes, "has the power to shape you, has the power to make you over into a different person— even if you're not totally engaged' in every minute!

Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.

All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort and effort means work.

Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.

The forlorn state of consciousness in our world is due primarily to loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon. The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data—including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness is not.