47 Progress Quotes For Motivation

In a world constantly evolving and demanding growth, finding motivation can sometimes be challenging. Whether you're striving for personal development, career advancement, or simply trying to make small but meaningful changes in your life, progress is the key. Quotes have the remarkable power to encapsulate wisdom and spark inspiration with just a few words. In this blog post, we’ve curated a collection of the top 47 progress quotes that will reignite your drive and propel you towards your goals. Each quote has been thoughtfully selected to provide you with daily encouragement and a fresh perspective on the importance of continual improvement. Let's dive in and draw motivation from these powerful words that can help you stay focused and committed to your journey of growth.

1. “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

2. “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.” - George Bernard Shaw

3. “Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.” - Winston S. Churchill

4. “Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” - C.S. Lewis

5. “In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.” - Walter de la Mare

6. “Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.” - George Monbiot

7. “Whatever is produced in haste goes hastily to waste.” - saadi

8. “The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.” - Ray Bradbury

9. “A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.” - George Bernard Shaw

10. “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” - Nikola Tesla

11. “When you do what you love, the seemingly impossible becomes simply challenging, the laborious becomes purposeful resistance, the difficult loses its edge and is trampled by your progress.” - Steve Maraboli

12. “The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.” - Benjamin Disraeli

13. “The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.” - Ernest Renan

14. “It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero

15. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.” - Oscar Wilde

16. “She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it.” - Ayn Rand

17. “We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence. ” - H.G. Wells

18. “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.""That's so," said Pa. "These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves--they're good things to have, but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.” - Laura Ingalls Wilder

19. “Garret went across the street to the library. There was a hole in the sidewalk the size of a bathtub. Construction was being done, was always being done. It was the journey that mattered, Garret thought woozily, the getting-there part. The mayor, and then the president, had begun saying that. "And where are we going?" the mayor had asked. "When will we get there? What will happen to us once we get there?" He really wanted to know.” - Tao Lin

20. “So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those that stood still said he went backward and should be killed. And the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were all fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools were called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did not get enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.” - Jack London

21. “Pro and con are opposites, that fact is clearly seen. If progress means to move forward, then what does congress mean?” - Nipsey Russell

22. “So, why do you write these strong female characters?Because you’re still asking me that question."[Equality Now speech, May 15, 2006]” - Joss Whedon

23. “The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!” - Wallace Stegner

24. “As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual or collective lives. We have to get on with things, and those who give precedence to suffering will be left behind. They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that there is a 'brotherhood of suffering between everything alive' would disable us from getting anywhere. We are preoccupied with the good life, and step by step are working toward a better life. What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next — as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet.” - Thomas Ligotti

25. “In history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost . . . especially against the narrow and futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to cover the slightest nakedness of our forefathers.” - Col. Thomas Aspinwall

26. “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” - George Orwell

27. “The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.” - Paul Karl Feyerabend

28. “The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” - Christopher Hitchens

29. “Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.” - Ayn Rand

30. “It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be called-- were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies. You may ridicule me--I am quite willing that you should-- I am a fit subject, no doubt. But I think if you knew what I have gone through these last few years you would rather pity me. And if they knew"--he nodded towards the college at which the dons were severally arriving--"it is just possible they would do the same.” - Thomas Hardy

31. “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.” - Barry Gehm

32. “The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do.” - Edward Abbey

33. “The world is to be carried forward by truth, which at first offends, which wins its way by degrees, which the many hate and would rejoice to crush.” - William Ellery Channing

34. “These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.” - Laura Ingalls Wilder

35. “In other words, I tasted a different drug. A drug called progress.” - Cameron Conaway

36. “Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents, Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising, See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream.” - Walt Whitman

37. “Progress is hard on history.” - Justina Chen Headley

38. “It's good to look at life from the bottom up so you can see that things have risen above what they once were.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

39. “...she was probably having a few murderous thoughts of her own about any woman that touched him. Good, they were making progress.” - R.L. Mathewson

40. “Change is inevitable, progress is not.” - Max Mckeown

41. “So we are steaming along without any landmark; we can't gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It's not navigation but dreaming.” - Albert Camus The Fall

42. “I've been guilty of over analyzing & under achieving.” - Steve Supple

43. “The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought 'dogmatic,' for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic.” - G.K. Chesterton

44. “Progress is not about hating or destroying America, it is about loving and building the world, which can only come from healing our national dementia.” - Bryant McGill

45. “Hey, you know I might not be perfect! But I'm a wonderful work in progress!” - D.C. Akers

46. “Reality always wins.” - Elizabeth Grace Saunders

47. “Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two" - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller