Quotes about Improvement

He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them. Y

First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.

Abilities wither under criticism; they blossom under encouragement. To become a more effective leader of people, apply…     Principle 6 Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be "hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.

The average person," said Samuel Vauclain, then president of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, "can be led readily if you have his or her respect and if you show that you respect that person for some kind of ability." In short, if you want to improve a person in a certain aspect, act as though that particular trait were already one of his or her outstanding characteristics.

It was no longer necessary to react the way we used to. The children were doing far more right things than wrong ones." All of this was a result of praising the slightest improvement in the children rather than condemning everything they did wrong. This works on the job too. Keith Roper of

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.

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.

A sense of our inadequacies and failings, a recognition that we could be better people than we usually are, is one of the forces for moral growth and improvement in our society. An appropriate sense of guilt makes people try to be better. But an excessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem and perhaps of our capacity to grow and to act.

Don't wish it were easier. Wish you were better.

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.

Our work in global health is about things like cutting childhood deaths, and every year we continue to make progress there.

And that's the great thing about living the Christian life and trying to live by faith, is you're trying to get better every day. You're trying to improve.