Quotes About Progress

had the good fortune to come from a generation that had no YA books available. Once you moved beyond children's books there was nowhere to go but adult books.

By 1937, every British trawler had a wireless, electricity, and an echometer - the forerunner of sonar. If getting into fishing had required the kind of capital in past centuries that it cost in the twentieth century, cod would never have built a nation of middle-class, self-made entrepreneurs in New England.

New black heroes were made and old ones dropped every day.

the four great inventions—paper, compass, gunpowder, and printing

Often the inventor that history remembers is not the true inventor, but the one who made the idea commercially successful. Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb either.

Philosophie du progrès, "We are

all government work, including that stored in libraries, to be switched from parchment to paper.

And so you have more opportunities and more responsibilities than any other generation in history.

Circuit boards have foundations made of paper;

Out time has come to change the world, one person at a time

The Pain of Becoming For the flower, it is fully open at each step of its blossoming. We do ourselves a great disservice by judging where we are in comparison to some final destination. This is one of the pains of aspiring to become something: the stage of development we are in is always seen against the imagined landscape of what we are striving for. So where we are—though closer all the time—is never quite enough.

Perhaps one of the hardest remedies to accept for our pain of becoming is that wherever we are in our path—no matter how flawed or incomplete—is a blossoming unto itself.

And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk to bloom. —ANAÏS NIN

How often do we lose sight of what we're really after, insisting on all or nothing, when there is so much abundance wherever we are and so many opportunities that can help us on our way?

life becomes a living of who we are until that form of self can no longer hold us, and, like Taaora in his shell, we must break the forms that contain us in order to birth our way into the next self. This is how we shed our many ways of seeing the world, not that any are false, but that each serves its purpose for a time until we grow and they no longer serve us.

E]ven through our limitations, we evolve rather than fail, the way a caterpillar becomes a chrysalis becomes a butterfly, and the succession of life's trials is precisely the unfolding we need to find our bliss and rightful place in the order of things.

We tend to make the thing in the way the way.

I listened carefully as he described his little girl's first steps. He encouraged her to keep her eyes on him, and only when she didn't, did she stumble. Only when she lost her focus, when she became too conscious of the steps she was taking, did she fall.

When those who know are able to show, those who learn are able to grow.

Big oaks grow from small acorns, and activity is a precursor to accomplishment. You don't think yourself into success.

Better is the most important step to becoming your best. If you want to be your best, you need to start by getting better. Start doing better. Good, better, best. That's how it works.

Staying the same isn't enough because yesterday's success can easily become tomorrow's mediocrity.

Don't wait for the perfect opportunity. Just take an opportunity and make it as perfect as you can.

position never determines performance, ultimately performance determines position in life.