Quotes About Progress

God's mill grinds slow, but sure.

The mill cannot grind with the water that's past.

He that is not handsome at twenty, nor strong at thirty, nor rich at forty, nor wise at fifty, will never be handsome, strong, rich, or wise.

There would be no great men if there were no little ones.

Thursday come, and the week is gone.

For if I wimp my wing on thine. Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

And I hope to stand for a new harmony, a greater tolerance. We've come far, but I think we need a new harmony among the races in our country. And we're on a journey into a new century, and we've got to leave that tired old baggage of bigotry behind.

You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

A sweat-shop displaced the plantation.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

The architecture of our future is not only unfinished the scaffolding has hardly gone up.

The human individual is equipped to learn and go on learning prodigiously from birth to death, and this is precisely what sets him or her apart from all other known forms of life.

A black belt is only one more step along an endless path, a license to go on learning for as long as you live.

Why does learning take place in spurts? Why can't we make steady upward progress on our way toward mastery? As we saw in the case of tennis, we have to keep practicing an unfamiliar movement again and again until we "get it in the muscle memory" or "program it into the autopilot.

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself. Rather than being frustrated while on the plateau, you learn to appreciate and enjoy it just as much as you do the upward surges.

The best horse, according to Suzuki, may be the worst horse. And the worst horse can be the best, for if it perseveres, it will have learned whatever it is practicing all the way to the marrow of its bones.

Perhaps the best you can hope for on the master's journey—whether your art be management or marriage, badminton or ballet—is to cultivate the mind and heart of the beginning at every stage along the way. For the master, surrender means there are no experts. There are only learners.

Where in our upbringing, our schooling, our career are we explicitly taught to value, to enjoy, even to love the plateau, the long stretch of diligent effort with no seeming progress?

Perhaps we'll never know how far the path can go, how much a human being can truly achieve, until we realize that the ultimate reward is not a gold medal but the path itself.

For the master, surrender means there are no experts. There are only learners.

What we call "mastery" can be defined as that mysterious process through which what is at first difficult or even impossible becomes easy and pleasurable through diligent, patient, long-term practice.

Excessive use of external motivation can slow and even stop your journey to mastery.

Prizes and medals. Excessive use of external motivation can slow and even stop your journey to mastery.

Education is about the only thing lying around loose in the world, and it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away.