Quotes About Progress

The circle of knowledge commences close round a man and thence stretches out concentrically.

Difficulties increase the nearer we approach our goal.

Everybody wants to be somebody nobody wants to grow.

Character develops itself in the stream of life.

Nothing hurts a new truth more than an old error.

Mere curiosity adds wings to every step.

Man errs as long as he strives.

Error is acceptable as long as we are young but one must not drag it along into old age.

America, you have it better than our continent, the old one.

The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.

Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done.

The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it… but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

By seeking and blundering we learn.

Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.

We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.

Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.

There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.

He who moves not forward, goes backward.

Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.

We usually lost today because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

The finished man, you know, is difficult to please; a growing mind will ever show you gratitude. --Faust 1, lines 182-3

Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.