“True progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice.”

Last update Aug. 6, 2024. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "True progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice." by Francis of Assisi?
Francis of Assisi photo
Francis of Assisi 49
Catholic saint and founder of the Franciscan Order 1182–1226

Related quotes

John D. Barrow photo
Rainer Maria Rilke photo

“And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Variant: Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (Translation by Stephen Mitchell)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

John Flanagan photo

“People will think what they want to," he said quietly. Never take too much notice of it.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Ruins of Gorlan

James Branch Cabell photo

“People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different.”

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 27 : Evolution of a Vestryman
Context: The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.

Quentin Crisp photo
Dante Alighieri photo

“Time moves and yet we do not notice it.”

Canto IV, line 9 (tr. Mandelbaum).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio

Rosa Luxemburg quote: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
Rosa Luxemburg photo

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

As is often the case, this quote appears to be something Luxemburg could have said or written, but searches for a source have been unsuccessful. While Luxemburg often used metaphors of breaking or shattering chains, this, apparently, is not one of them. See: https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/reference-desk-unanswered-questions/

Sören Kierkegaard photo

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

John Wooden photo

“Although there is no progress without change, not all change is progress.”

John Wooden (1910–2010) American basketball coach

Source: Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

Abraham Pais photo

“Progress leads to confusion leads to progress and on and on without respite.”

Abraham Pais (1918–2000) American Physicist

Inward Bound : Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (1988) http://books.google.com/books?id=mREnwpAqz-YC, p. 4
Context: Progress leads to confusion leads to progress and on and on without respite. Every one of the many major advances … created sooner or later, more often sooner, new problems. These confusions, never twice the same, are not to be deplored. Rather, those who participate experience them as a privilege.

Related topics