Quotes About Progress

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.

Observe always that everything is the result of change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and make new ones like them.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? What's closer to nature's heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed? Can't you see? It's just the same with you—and just as vital to nature.

The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. 21.

All is change. You yourself are continuously changing and being destroyed bit by bit. So is the whole universe.

Remember how long thou hast already put off these things, and how

Not the "not" but the "not yet.

All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it.

What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself. That was indeed a great benefit; such a person can never be alone. You may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.

Change: nothing inherently bad in the process, nothing inherently good in the result.

A rock thrown in the air. It loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up.

We shrink from change; yet is there anything that can come into being without it?

XV. Is any man so foolish as to fear change, to which all things that once were not owe their being? And

Fire feeds on obstacles

It should be a man's task, says the Imitation, 'to overcome himself, and every day to be stronger than himself.

You have to assemble you life yourself - action by action. And be satisfied if each one achieves its goal, as far as it can. No one can keep that from happening.

60. An arrow has one motion and the mind another. Even when pausing, even when weighing conclusions, the mind is moving forward, toward its goal. 61. To enter others' minds and let them enter yours.

Constant awareness that everything is born from change. The knowledge that there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.

35. We have various abilities, present in all rational creatures as in the nature of rationality itself. And this is one of them. Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it—turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself—so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.

as the heaps of sand piled on one another hide the former sands, so in life the events which go before are soon covered by those which come after.

When he speaks of death as a necessary change, and points out that nothing useful and profitable can be brought about without change

And don't go expecting Plato's Republic; be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it all as unimportant.

You have to assemble your life yourself - action by action. And be satisfied if each one achieves its goal, as far as it can. No one can keep that from happening.