progress on Failure

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...

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

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

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

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

Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus (He who ceases to be better ceases to be good)

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

Never mistake motion for action.

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 ...

Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

"Progress is not accomplished in one stage."

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...

“And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

R. C. Sproul observes that there are similarities between the sanctification of the Christian believer and the travails of Sisyphus. He was the Greek hero forever doomed to roll a boulder up a hill ag...

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated indi...

I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.

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...

The true enemies of progress are doubt, apathy, and blame. They must be conquered in your mind (that is the first battleground) before you can become the revolutionary you were born to be.

If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.

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

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...

We are taught, often by the tone of voice of the media and the politicians rather than by explicit argument, to bow down before…progress. It is unstoppable. Who wants to be left behind, to be behind t...

There is no way out, only a way forward.

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

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.

To progress is always to begin always to begin again.

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.

People say there's delays on flights. Delays? Really? New York to California in five hours. That used to take 30 years, and a bunch of you would die on the way there, and have a baby. You'd be...

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