"Progress however, of the best kind, is comparatively slow. Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step"
About this Quote
Smiles makes patience sound less like a virtue and more like a discipline, the kind you practice when you do not have the luxury of sudden transformation. The line’s quiet force is in its refusal to flatter the reader with inevitability. Progress, even “of the best kind,” is “comparatively slow” - an almost deflationary phrase that punctures the romantic fantasy of the breakthrough. It’s a Victorian sentence doing Victorian work: taming desire, turning ambition into regimen.
The subtext is moral and political at once. Smiles isn’t merely describing how change tends to happen; he’s prescribing how a respectable person should want it to happen. “We must be satisfied” is the hinge. Satisfaction here isn’t happiness, it’s consent: accept incrementalism, accept limits, accept that the world won’t reorganize itself around your urgency. In that sense, the quote functions as a small manifesto for self-help before self-help was branded - and for social stability disguised as personal wisdom.
Context matters: Smiles, best known for Self-Help (1859), wrote in an industrial Britain where fortunes were being made, cities were swelling, and class tensions were simmering. Step-by-step progress fits a society that needs workers to endure, reformers to temper their demands, and strivers to internalize responsibility. The walking metaphor is strategic: ordinary, embodied, unglamorous. It implies that the only honest route forward is the one that looks like daily life - repetitive, sometimes boring, but cumulatively transformative.
The subtext is moral and political at once. Smiles isn’t merely describing how change tends to happen; he’s prescribing how a respectable person should want it to happen. “We must be satisfied” is the hinge. Satisfaction here isn’t happiness, it’s consent: accept incrementalism, accept limits, accept that the world won’t reorganize itself around your urgency. In that sense, the quote functions as a small manifesto for self-help before self-help was branded - and for social stability disguised as personal wisdom.
Context matters: Smiles, best known for Self-Help (1859), wrote in an industrial Britain where fortunes were being made, cities were swelling, and class tensions were simmering. Step-by-step progress fits a society that needs workers to endure, reformers to temper their demands, and strivers to internalize responsibility. The walking metaphor is strategic: ordinary, embodied, unglamorous. It implies that the only honest route forward is the one that looks like daily life - repetitive, sometimes boring, but cumulatively transformative.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
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