progress on Discovery

The Double Helix, James Watson’s 1968 memoir about discovering the structure of DNA, describes the roller coaster of emotions he and Francis Crick experienced through the progress and setbacks of the ...

We were created for goodness and perfection. That’s why we innovate, progress, and change. But if our progress loses its purpose, it cannibalizes our humanity, leaving us distracted and disoriented.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.”

“Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial...

To reach a port we must set sail – Sail, not tie at anchor Sail, not drift.

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them as from a root.

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

If we see more and further than they, it is not because of our own clear eyes or tall bodies, but because we are raised on high by their gigantic stature.

It is not strange... to mistake change for progress.

Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far m...

Don't take the fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.”

“We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.”

The same impulse that makes us want our books to have a plot makes us want our lives to have a plot. We need to feel that we are getting somewhere, making progress. There is something in us that is no...

Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

As a baby, Albert Einstein caused his parents some concern. His head seemed disproportionately large, and he did not start speaking until he was three. As a young man, his career faced setbacks, in...

A YouTube video from the Today Show in 1994 shows Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric asking each other “What is the Internet?” and debating if the “@” symbol means “at” or “about.” The world is very diffe...

The myth of progress has deep roots in contemporary Western culture, and some of those roots are Christian…This utopian dream is in fact a parody of the Christian vision. The kingdom of God and the ki...

Never mistake motion for action.

With vainglory, we crave notice of our achievements with pride, we take full credit for the progress we have made and do not think that God has been involved at all, let alone been our indispensible h...

Last year I joined the growing ranks of people who have made the return to music on vinyl. There is much debate in my family as to whether I’m a hipster or will soon be eating dinner at 4 p.m. and wea...

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

I will go anywhere, provided it is forward.

Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who ca...

Temporis filia veritas; cui me obstetricari non pudet. Translation: Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

Ray Johnston, in The Hope Quotient , shares a remarkable insight from a leading psychologist who had spent his career helping deeply troubled married couples rebuild their relationships after yea...

At every point in the human journey we find that we have to let go in order to move forward; and letting go means dying a little. In the process we are being created anew, awakened afresh to the sourc...

The animal behavior scientist Temple Grandin, who achieved significant success while struggling with autism, has this to say on the subject of progress: People are always looking for the single ma...