Quotes About Progress

Books are the best type of influence of the past...Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

I know too well how slowly we edge along sideways to every thing good & brilliant in our lives & how casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

What we fear of doing most is usually what we most need to do.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered you will never grow.

Great men exist that there may be greater men.

Every man contemplates an angel in his future self

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams

The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, feeds upon itself.

why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Men succeed when they realize that their failures are the preparation for their victories.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

That which we persist on doing becomes easier, not that the nature of the task has changed , but our ability to do has increased.

Life is an experiment. The more experiments the better

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age

Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engrafted with a foreign stock.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.