Quotes About Progress

The point of imperfection which we occupy -- is it on the way up or down?

Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.

This surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding.

Wherever a man comes, there comes a revolution. The old is for slaves.

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

natural science is likely to be soon exhausted. Passing by many particulars of the discipline

We want a ship in these billows we inhabit.

Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought for the morrow.

The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.

The truest test of civilization is not the census, size of cities, or crops; but the kind of man the country turns out.

I think that our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced.

Life is a journey, not a destination

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.

Finish everyday and be done with it. You have done what you could.

Every artist was first an amateur

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Truths will harmonize; and as for the falsities and mistakes, they will speedily die of themselves.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.