|
|
Westward the star of empire takes its way.
Author: John Quincy Adams
Source: in an oration at Plymouth, Massachusetts
|
All rising to great place is by a winding stair.
Author: John Quincy Adams
Source: in an oration at Plymouth, Massachusetts
|
Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like
clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set
to true time.
Author: Henry Ward Beecher
Source: Life Thoughts
|
Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last.
Author: Bishop George Berkeley
Source: Verses, on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America
|
What is art
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushed toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art's life--and where we live, we suffer and toil.
Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Source: Aurora Leigh (bk. IV, l. 1,150)
|
Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's, and not the beast's;
God is, they are,
Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.
Author: Robert Browning
Source: A Death in the Desert
|
Like plants in mines, which never saw the sun,
But dream of him, and guess where he may be,
And do the best to climb, and get to him.
Author: Robert Browning
Source: Paracelsus (last page)
|
Progress is
The law of life, man is not
Man as yet.
Author: Robert Browning
Source: Paracelsus (pt. V)
|
A man prepared has half fought the battle.
[Sp., Hombre apercebido medio combatido.]
Author: Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)
Source: Don Quixote (2, 7)
|
All things journey: sun and moon,
Morning, noon, and afternoon,
Night and all her stars;
'Twixt the east and western bars
Round they journey,
Come and go!
We go with them!
Author: George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans Cross)
Source: The Spanish Gypsy (bk. III, song)
|
What we call "progress " is the exchange of one nuisance for
another nuisance.
Author: Henry Havelock Ellis
Source: Impressions and Comments
|
And striving to be Man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source: Mayday
|
With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three
thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation
Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist
that there is no such thing as progress.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source: Mayday
|
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings,
goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make
sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of
Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
Author: Henry George
Source: Progress and Poverty--Introductory--The Problem
|
Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train.
Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty
miles an hour and you're just sitting still?
Author: Henry George
Source: Progress and Poverty--Introductory--The Problem
|
Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral
with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and
dissolution.
Author: Henry George
Source: Progress and Poverty--Introductory--The Problem
|
He who moves not forward goes backward!
A capital saying!
Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Source: Hermann and Dorothea (canto III, l. 66)
|
To look up and not down,
To look forward and not back,
To look out and not in--and
To lend a hand.
Author: Edward Everett Hale
Source: Rule of the "Harry Wadsworth Club" (ch. IV), from "Ten Times One in Ten"
|
Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?
Author: Stanislaw Lec
Source: Unkempt Thoughts
|
I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a
bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has
had before.
Author: Gerald Stanley Lee
Source: Crowds (pt. II, ch. III)
|
From lower to the higher next,
Not to the top, is Nature's text;
And embryo good, to reach full stature,
Absorbs the evil in its nature.
Author: James Russell Lowell
Source: Festina Lente--Moral
|
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of
truth.
Author: James Russell Lowell
Source: Present Crisis
|
"Spiral!" the memorable Lady terms
Our mind's ascent.
Author: George Meredith
Source: The World's Advance, in notes to Meredith's "Poetical Works", G.M. Trevelyan says the Lady is Mrs. B
|
That in our proper motion we ascend
Up to our native seat; descent and fall
To give us is adverse.
Author: John Milton
Source: Paradise Lost (bk. II, l. 75)
|
What follows I flee; what flees I ever pursue.
[Lat., Quod sequitur, fugio; quod fugit, usque sequor.]
Author: Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
Source: Amorum (II, 19, 36)
|
There is no advancement to him who stands trembling because he cannot see the end from the beginning.
Author: E. J. Klemme
Source: None
|
I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.
Author: Frank Moore Colby
Source: None
|
Those who work most for the world's advancement are the ones who demand least.
Author: Henry Doherty
Source: None
|
Not to go back is somewhat to advance, and men must walk, at least, before they dance.
Author: Alexander Pope
Source: None
|
Progress is the process whereby the human race is getting rid of whiskers, the veriform appendix and God.
Author: H. L. Mencken
Source: None
|
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, but the unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to him--therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
Author: Samuel Butler
Source: None
|
He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still.
Author: Charles Caleb Colton
Source: None
|
Speak softly, and carry a big stick; you will go far.
Author: Theodore Roosevelt
Source: None
|
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?
Author: Stanislaw Lem
Source: None
|
I walk slowly, but I never walk backward.
Author: Abraham Lincoln
Source: None
|