Quotes About Progress

Conscious individuals know that if they wish to advance in their careers they cannot rest on yesterday's knowledge and skills. An overattachment to the known and familiar has become costly and dangerous; it threatens both organizations and individuals with obsolescence. Scientific

Those who believe they have "thought enough" and "learned enough" are on a downward trajectory of increasing unconsciousness.

Entrepreneurship is by its nature antiauthority. It is anti-status quo. It is always moving in the direction of making what exists obsolete. Early in this century the economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote of the work of the entrepreneur as that of "creative destruction.

Today one needs an education. One needs formal training. Or else one needs to be extraordinarily gifted at self-education. And one needs to understand that the process can never stop, because new knowledge begins to make one's training obsolete almost as soon as one completes it.

Flexibility. To be flexible is to be able to respond to change without inappropriate attachments binding one to the past.

It is not acceptance but denial that leaves me stuck.

Knowledge is more widely disseminated and freely available than ever before, making it much easier for people to operate at higher levels of consciousness in their work and consequently to be more productive.

Every day, it's important to ask and answer these questions: "What's good in my life?" and "What needs to be done?

The first step towards change is awareness, the second step is acceptance.

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

He had that sense, or inward prophecy,-- which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,-- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.

His error lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in applying his own little life span as the measure of an interminable acheivement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it.

He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little.

as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whiter so varied a caravan had preceded him.

All human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.

La razza umana, come ogni altro seme, non prospera rigogliosa, se trapiantata nello stesso terreno troppo a lungo sfruttato.

While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.

There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end; but the progress of the world, at every step, leaves some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found the way to rectify.

She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.

as to the better centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay, in supposing that his age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork…

But I am weary of this place, and sick to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery in our effort to establish the one true system. I

Thus Ethan Brand become a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect. And now, as his highest effort and inevitable development -- as the bright and gorgeous flower, and rich, delicious fruit of his life's labor -- he had produced the Unpardonable Sin!

Families are always rising and falling in America.