Quotes About Progress

Done is better than good.

It's a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.

What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.

Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.

And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

I was doing something I'd never done before. And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?

A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

We are all just beginners here, and we shall all die beginners.

All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.

Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end.

If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's working on you.

It may be that same-sex couples will save the institution of marriage.

failure has a function. It asks you whether you really want to go on making things.

Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don't need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. .. Even in the Eternal City (Rome), says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.

I always hated hearing old people yammering on like this when I was young. And I do what to assure you: I'm aware that many thing were not better in the 1940s. Underarm deodorants and air-conditioning were woefully inadequate, for instance, so everybody stank like crazy, especially in the summer, and also we had Hitler.

At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is-if only so you can go on and make other things with a glad and determined heart.

The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don't believe in evolution).

The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm.

Inevitably even the most original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for everybody.

Embrace the creativity and don't care about the result. It's better to be a beginner till the end of the life than waiting forever to be perfect.