quotations about change
Things do not change; we change.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
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
Nothing lasts. That's what makes everything ... so precious.
WILLIAM SHATNER
The Ashes of Eden
Change in all things is sweet.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
The world's a scene of changes, and to be
Constant, in Nature were inconstancy.
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Inconstancy
Those who object to what is new are controlled by the love of what is old.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Change", Reactions and Other Essays
It's the way people try not to change that's unnatural. The way we cling to what things were instead of letting them be what they are.
DR. MEREDITH GREY
"With You I'm Born Again", Grey's Anatomy
Bottom line is, even if you see them coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So, what are we, helpless? Puppets? Nah. The big moments are gonna come, you can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that count. That's when you find out who you are.
WHISTLER
"Becoming: Part Two", Buffy the Vampire Slayer
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
Fear of change is a part of the state of fear man has ever lived in but out of which he has begun to escape. Civilization might be defined indeed as the steps in his escape.
ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
Fear and Conventionality
Change happened and you thought it was forever, and immediately there were all the enemies of that change making common cause and meeting in the cloakrooms.
C. J. CHERRYH
Chanur's Legacy
Every generation gets a chance to change the world
Pity the nation that won't listen to your boys and girls
Cause the sweetest melody is the one we haven't heard
U2
"I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight"
Things must change
We must rearrange them
Or we'll have to estrange them
All that I'm saying
A game's not worth playing
Over and over again
DEPECHE MODE
"The Sun and the Rainfall"
Things change whether you want them to, or not--unless you are dead. Don't hold so hard to the past that you die with it.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
River Marked
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
Strong communities ... embrace change. New discoveries require us to think differently and approach things differently, to think anew.
TOM VILSACK
speech, Jan. 10, 2006
My life changes all the time.
Things were different when you were mine.
You loved me yesterday.
Now these changes have come to stay.
ROY ORBISON
"Changes"
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
I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.
DAVID SEDARIS
Naked
Change is inevitable in a progressive society. Change is constant.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
speech, Oct. 29, 1867