The world is moving so fast now-a-days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.
Time advances: facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain, and penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on.
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
Today's progress was yesterday's plan.
Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.
We are either progressing or retrograding all the while. There is no such thing as remaining stationary in this life.
We have not wings we cannot soar; but, we have feet to scale and climb, by slow degrees, by more and more, the cloudy summits of our time.
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another.
Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.
When a blind man carries a lame man both go forward.
When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.
Why aren't we making any progress towards a crime-free society? We're not making progress because we are too damn busy making excuses.
With every passing hour, our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.
You can't say that civilization don't advance… for in every war they kill you a new way.
You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.
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