Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Progress
Westward the star of empire takes its way.
John Quincy Adams—Oration at Plymouth. (1802). Misquoted from Berkeley on inside cover of an early edition of Bancroft’s History of United States.
Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time.
Henry Ward Beecher—Life Thoughts.
Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
Bishop Berkeley—Verses, on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America.
What is art
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushed toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art’s life—and where we live, we suffer and toil.
E. B. Browning—Aurora Leigh. Bk. IV. L. 1150.
Finds progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
Not God’s, and not the beast’s;
God is, they are,
Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.
Robert Browning—A Death in the Desert.
Progress is
The law of life, man is not
Man as yet.
Robert Browning—Paracelsus. Pt. V.
Like plants in mines, which never saw the sun,
But dream of him, and guess where he may be,
And do their best to climb, and get to him.
Robert Browning—Paracelsus. Last page.
Hombre apercebido medio combatido.
A man prepared has half fought the battle.
Cervantes—Don Quixote. 2. 17.
All things journey: sun and moon,
Morning, noon, and afternoon,
Night and all her stars;
Twixt the east and western bars
Round they journey,
Come and go!
We go with them!
George Eliot—Spanish Gypsy. Bk. III. Song.
And striving to be Man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
Emerson—Mayday.
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
Henry George—Progress and Poverty. Introductory. The Problem.
Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.
Goethe.
He who moves not forward goes backward!
A capital saying!
Goethe—Herman and Dorothea. Canto III. L. 66.
To look up and not down,
To look forward and not back,
To look out and not in—and
To lend a hand.
Edward Everett Hale—Rule of the “Harry Wadsworth Club.” From Ten Times One is Ten. (1870). Ch. IV.
I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has had before.
Gerald Stanley Lee—Crowds. Pt. II. Ch. III.
From lower to the higher next,
Not to the top, is Nature’s text;
And embryo good, to reach full stature,
Absorbs the evil in its nature.
Lowell—Festina Lente. Moral.
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.
Lowell—Present Crisis.
“Spiral” the memorable Lady terms
Our mind’s ascent.
George Meredith—The World’s Advance. G. M. Trevelyan in notes to Meredith’s Poetical Works says the “memorable Lady” is Mrs. Browning.
That in our proper motion we ascend
Up to our native seat; descent and fall
To us is adverse.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. II. L. 75.
Quod sequitur, fugio; quod fugit, usque sequor.
What follows I flee; what flees I ever pursue.
Ovid—Amorum. II. 19, 36.
Vogue la galère.
Row on [whatever happens].
Rabelais—Gargantua. I. 3.
Il est un terme de la vie au-delà duquel en rétrograde en avançant.
There is a period of life when we go back as we advance.
Rousseau—Émile. II.
The march of intellect.
Robert Southey—Sir T. More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society. Vol. II. P. 361. Quoted by Carlyle—Miscel. Essays. Vol. I. P. 162. (Ed. 1888).
L’esprit humain fait progrès toujours, mais c’est progrès en spirale.
The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.
Madame de Staël.
If you strike a thorn or rose,
Keep a-goin’!
If it hails or if it snows,
Keep a-goin’!
’Tain’t no use to sit and whine
’Cause the fish ain’t on your line;
Bait you hook an’ keep on tryin’,
Keep a-goin’!
Frank L. Stanton—Keep a-goin.’
When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
Rabindranath Tagore—Gitanjali. 37.
The stone that is rolling, can gather no moss.
Tusser—Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. Huswifely Admonitions. Gosson—Ephemendes of Phialo. Marston—The Faun. Syrus—Maxims. 524. Pierre volage ne queult mousse. De l’hermite qui se désepéra pour le larron que ala en paradis avant que lui. 13th Cent.
Qui n’a pas l’esprit de son âge,
De son âge a tout le malheur.
He who has not the spirit of his age, has all the misery of it.
Voltaire—Lettre à Cideville.
Press on!—“for in the grave there is no work
And no device”—Press on! while yet ye may!
N. P. Willis—From a Poem Delivered at Yale College, 1827. L. 45.