“True progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice.”
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Francis of Assisi49
Catholic saint and founder of the Franciscan Order 1182–1226Related quotes
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
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.
“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 book The Cream of the Jest
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.
“Time moves and yet we do not notice it.”
Dante Alighieri book Purgatorio
Canto IV, line 9 (tr. Mandelbaum).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio
“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 (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism
Source: The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening
“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
“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 <br class="br">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.