Quotes About Progress

Carl Jung said that most painful issues can't be solved—they can only be outgrown, but that takes time and deep work.

E.L. Doctorow once said that writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

In the rabbinical tradition, there is great insight in the notion that when we see suffering, we remember that this is only the sixth day. We're not done here. The good news is that God isn't, either. God is searching with us for a cure for cancer. God rejoiced at the cure for smallpox.

What seems true is something in that something in life or in our own hearts is always being installed or being repaired or being torn down for the next installation or the mess of the repair or tear down is being cleaned and cleared out.

have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

We can change. People say we can't, but we do when the the stakes or the pain is high enough.

Has been done. Can be done. Must be done...

Each egg hatched a different way, but a crack at the right time speeded things up.

The mind that will not admit it has something more to learn tomorrow is in danger of stagnating.

Looking ahead is far more constructive than looking behind, said Robinton. He held his clenched fist up. I'd all the facts in my grasp and I couldn't see the water for the waves.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.

One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to an old form of relationship; and, more deeply still, that there is no holding of a relationship to a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth.

Every step, even a tentative one, counts.

All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms. But there is no single fixed form to express such a changing relationship.

Great problems that face the world today in both the private and the public sphere cannot be solved by women – or by men – alone. They can only be surmounted by men and women side by side.

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

Why do progress and beauty have to be so opposed? ; 75 Also, as in war, the case, like a great bubbling cauldron of life itself, threw up both good and evil. Greed, madness, cruelty and indifference were countered by goodness, devotion, self-sacrifice, and courage. p 178

There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change

In a growing relationship, however, the original essence is not lost but merely buried under the impedimenta of life.

But easy victories pall after a while. If one always wins, perhaps one is attempting only what is well within one's capabilities—and there lies a kind of death, don't you think? That which does not grow may well be showing the first signs of atrophy.

Science is just the latest theory we have, and as soon as another one comes along, a new discovery, a new way of interpreting them, then there's a new answer! It's not like mathematics that always adds up the same way, if you do it right. Science is a method of reaching a conclusion, not a conclusion itself.

sometimes it's not the errors you make but how you recover from them that mark the difference between failure and success