Quotes About Progress

The more you know of your own line of work, by so much do you set yourself a little apart from a hundred of your competitors who are content to let well enough alone.

It is the ship at the wharf, not the ship at sea, that rots fastest;—the still pool, not the running brook, that stagnates.

No matter how strongly and perfectly constructed, or how powerful a locomotive may be, unless the water is heated to 212 degrees, the train will not move an inch. Warm water, water even at the boiling point, will not answer.

Growth everywhere neutralizes decay. So long as we keep growing, renewing the mind, constantly reaching out for the new and progressive, the retrograding, disintegrating, aging, deteriorating processes cannot be operative.

Does it pay to change a bar of rough pig iron into hairsprings for watches, thus increasing its worth to more than fifty times the value of its weight in gold?

Remember that it is only through your work that you can grow to your full height.

Only those things grow in our nature which are fed. The quickest way to kill them is to cut off their nourishment.

I never knew a man to be successful who was always talking about business being bad. The habit of looking down, talking down, is fatal to advancement.

but you must see a new world before you can live in it. It is to what you see, to what you believe, to what you struggle incessantly to attain, that you will approximate.

whether it is an engine or a human brain,—exercise or deteriorate is the law of life.

Fear and doubt, discouragement and worry are always found together. They belong to the same family, and work for the same end — to rob people of energy and ambition, and to keep them from doing what they were made to do. They have ever been the great retarders of human progress, the great killers of ability, the blighters of happiness, the stranglers of aspirations, the murderers of success.

LIVE UPWARD. Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven, And this thy last deed ere the judgment day. If you wish to reach the highest begin at the lowest.

Want has been the great schoolmaster of the race: necessity has been the mother of all great inventions.

The man who is mentally expanding, who is constantly growing larger and becoming broader, fuller, completer, does not age nearly as rapidly as the man who has ceased to grow.

Do little things now, says a Persian proverb; so shall big things come to thee by and by asking to be done. God will take care of the great things if we do not neglect the little ones.

efficiency never has to go begging for advancement; the man that masters his trade goes to the front.

We try to grasp too much of life at once; since we think of it as a whole, instead of living one day at a time. Life is a mosaic, and each tiny piece must be cut and set with skill, first one piece, then another.

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

None of us could be happy for long, doing nothing.

What else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.

In order to learn, one must change one's mind.

Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generaitons, giving brith to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire...I'll put it bluntly. Human beings are free excpet when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me - to find out what you're good for.