Quotes About Improvement

When we denigrate mediocrity, we discourage ourselves and others from trying new things. It would be great to be a great painter, but it's also great just to paint. Or sing or throw pots or knit scarves or play chess.

Samuel Smiles's 1859 bestseller Self-Help (with illustrations of Character and Conduct).

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the edit." [ Ten rules for writing fiction (part two) , The Guardian, 20 February 2010]

He adds that the worse a man is, the less likely he is to accept constructive criticism.

He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or on the way to become sounder.

Stoic philosopher Seneca, about whom I will have much to say in this book, "He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or on the way to become sounder.

He'd shot a 136—a full ten strokes better than Conner.

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.

It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes an interesting side branch.

India in the 1840s and 1850s was slowly filling with pious British Evangelicals who wanted not just to rule and administer India, but also to redeem and improve it.

Enlightenment meant criticism, a belief that nothing was beyond rational improvement, and that nothing was justifiable that could not be shown to be useful to humanity, or to promote human happiness.

Hoy en día, la falta de retroalimentación es uno de los defectos más críticos de la ayuda.

Error is discipline through which we advance.

Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.

The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

Not a tenth of us who are in business are doing as well as we could if we merely followed the principles that were known to our grandfathers.

If you improve education by teaching for competence, eliminating schooling, and connecting with students, the test scores will improve.

I think education is both using and improving knowledge and that changes the whole picture.

Social improvement is not to be won by direct effort. It is secondary, and results from physical or economic improvements. That

I've been doing a lot of learning from mistakes, first and foremost, and building off that.

Hang out with people who are better than you and you cannot help but improve." Pabrai acts on this advice to a degree that would horrify many people. "When I meet someone for the first time, I evaluate them afterwards and say, 'Will it make me better or worse to have a relationship with this person?'" If the answer is worse, he says, "I'll cut him out.