progress on Longings

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...

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.

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...

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

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

Pilgrimage is centered around one thing—progression. God does not call us to be static saints, even if we cannot move physically. We are constantly on the move spiritually, evolving in our understandi...

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...

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

I will go anywhere, provided it is forward.

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...

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.

There is no way out, only a way forward.

Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an ...

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.

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

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

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

The modern world has had far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn...

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

“If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light," Ma considered. "We didn't lack for light when I was a girl before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of." "Th...

Yet despite all of these advancements, we are more discontent than ever. Gregg Easterbrook wrote a book on this very topic entitled The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. ...

I started flying small Cessna planes when I was in high school, and I vividly remember one flight between McGregor, TX and Austin. We had an incredibly strong tail wind down to Austin, so we got there...

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.”

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.

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

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

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...

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...

To progress is always to begin always to begin again.

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...