quotations about change
The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
MAYA ANGELOU
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
To change the name and not the letter,
Is a change for the worst, and not for the better.
ROBERT CHAMBERS
Book of Days
Strong communities ... embrace change. New discoveries require us to think differently and approach things differently, to think anew.
TOM VILSACK
speech, Jan. 10, 2006
Nature obliges everything to change about.
One thing crumbles and falls in the weakness of age;
Another grows in its place from a negligible start.
So time alters the whole nature of the world
And earth passes from one state to another.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
A man can always change things. That's what makes him different from the barnyard critters.
MA STONE
All That Money Can Buy
Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
When people can't abide things as they are, when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things ... either they ... either they turn to a contemplation of the past ... or they set about to ... alter the future. And when you want to change something ... YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
EDWARD ALBEE
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The same is not always the same.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
Change in all things is sweet.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Many ... are simply skeptical that real change can occur. There is so much fear, so much mistrust that has built up over the years. But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward. And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith in every country. You more than anyone have the ability to reimagine the world, to remake this world.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Jun. 4, 2009
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm not sure who the first person was who said that. Probably Shakespeare. Or maybe Sting. But at the moment, it's the sentence that best explains my tragic flaw, my inability to change. I don't think I'm alone in this. The more I get to know other people, the more I realize it's kind of everyone's flaw. Staying exactly the same for as long as possible, standing perfectly still ... it feels safer somehow. And if you are suffering, at least the pain is familiar.
EPHRAM BROWN
"My Brother's Keeper", Everwood
The architecture of change involves the design and construction of new patterns, or the reconceptualization of old ones, to make new, and hopefully more productive, actions possible.
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER
The Change Masters
Don't go changing to try and please me
You never let me down before
BILLY JOEL
"Just the Way You Are"
Is any man afraid of change? Why what can take place without change?
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
The nature o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Nothing is permanent. This is the central teaching of the Buddha. Not a career, not an institution, not a wife, not a tree ... All is change; change is the only truth.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
The Windup Girl
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Weep not that the world changes -- did it keep a stable, changeless state, it were cause indeed to weep.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
Mutation
Real change happens bit by bit. It takes great effort to become effortless at anything. There are no quick fixes.
GENEEN ROTH
Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything