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• He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace.
  • John Ruskin

• "Can any good come out of Nazareth?" This is always the question of the wiseacres and the knowing ones. But the good, the new, comes from exactly that quarter whence it is not looked for, and is always something different from what is expected. Everything new is received with contempt, for it begins in obscurity. It becomes a power unobserved.
  • Feuerbach

• Look up and not down; look forward and not back; look out and not in; and lend a hand.
  • Edward Everett Hale

• I must do something to keep my thoughts fresh and growing. I dread nothing so much as falling into a rut and feeling myself becoming a fossil.
  • James A. Garfield

• Humanity, in the aggregate, is progressing, and philanthropy looks forward hopefully.
  • Hosea Ballou

• Human improvement is from within outwards.
  • Froude

• An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.
  • Emerson

• Let us labor for that larger and larger comprehension of truth, that more and more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
  • Horace Mann

• We can trace back our existence almost to a point. Former time presents us with trains of thoughts gradually diminishing to nothing. But our ideas of futurity are perpetually expanding. Our desires and our hopes, even when modified by our fears, seem to grasp at immensity. This alone would be sufficient to prove the progressiveness of our nature, and that this little earth is but a point from which we start toward a perfection of being.
  • Sir Humphry Davy

• By the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young; but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.
  • Edmund Burke

• We are either progressing or retrograding all the while; there is no such thing as remaining stationary in this life.
  • James Freeman Clarke

• It is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin grammar, and one of those tow-head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer's iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.
  • Emerson

• A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.
  • Lytton

• The wisest man may be wiser to-day than he was yesterday, and to-morrow than he is to-day. Total freedom from change would imply total freedom from error; but this is the prerogative of Omniscience alone.
  • Charles Colton

• To progress you must go forwards, but not too far or you begin to go backwards.
  • Anonymous

• What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
  • Havelock Ellis

• Progress is the process whereby the human race is getting rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix, and God.
  • H. L. Mencken

• Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.
  • George Bernard Shaw

• There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
  • Aldous Huxley