Leo Tolstoy Quotes

It is through science that we understand the world around us, and by understanding the world around us, we not only contribute to ourselves, our family, to our communities, etc. - you also contribute to the basic development and evolution of humanity.

There is another very specific quality which distinguishes them [man from animals], and which will admit of no dispute. This is the faculty of self-improvement, which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual: whereas a brute is, at the end of a few months, all he will ever be during his whole life, and his species, at the end of a thousand years, exactly what it was the first year of that thousand.

I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.

Contemporary thinkers would say that man is continuously transcending himself.

The only barrier to human development is ignorance, and this is not insurmountable.

We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.

The very first instrument for the improvement of the condition of men is knowledge.

Science, which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of transforming himself.

We all have to get better as human beings and that's something you can't really get away from.

Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.

People are the common denominator of progress; no improvement is possible with unimproved people.

By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.

Progress is The law of life: man is not Man as yet.

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

If a man, before he passed from one stage to another, could know his future life in full detail, he would have nothing to live for. It is the same with the life of humanity. If it had a programme of the life which awaited it before entering a new stage, it would be the surest sign that it was not living, nor advancing, but simply rotating in the same place.

None of us have yet seen an ideally perfect man, and yet without that ideal we cannot progress.

When an individual passes from one period of life to another a time comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and excitement as before, but has to understand that although he has out-grown what before used to direct him, this does not mean that he must live without any reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for himself an understanding of life corresponding to his age, and having elucidated it must be guided by it. And in the same way a similar time must come in the growth and development of humanity.

I'd rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.

How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.

It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress... it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

No matter how old we become, we can acquire knowledge and use it. We can gather wisdom and profit from it. We can grow and progress and improve-and, in the process, strengthen the livs of those within our circle of influence.

We all do grow as humans.

Humans change themselves through technology.

See what is worth learning, and what is worth doing. Thus, you gain an understanding of what is vital, and what is not vital. You need to learn what is important and what is not important. You need to understand what will move you upwards and onwards, and what will hinder you from traveling the higher path.

You're progressing on something and that's what it's all about. You wanna keep moving, having a progress in your life.