Change Quotations

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Here are a few well chosen words about Change, penned by others, that you may find inspiration in or perhaps be amused by….

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. Anatole France
"All things in this world are impermanent. They have the nature to rise and pass away. To be in harmony with this truth brings true happiness." --Buddhist chant
"Cambia, todo cambia." - Mercedes Sosa
- Translation "Changing, everything is changing."
"Change is not merely necessary to life -- IT IS LIFE." - Alvin Toffler
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." - Tolstoy
"For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change." - Ingrid Bengis
"History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot." - Mark Twain
"If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." - Giuseppe di Lamedosa
"In the same way as the tree bears the same fruit year after year, but each time new fruit, all lastingly valuable ideas in thinking must always be reborn."- Albert Schweitzer
"In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." - Eric Hoffer
"It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be." - James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
"Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed." - Irene Peter
"Of the forces which are imperceptible forces, none is greater than that of change ... all things are ever in the state of change ... therefore the I of the past is no longer the I of today." - Chang-tzu, 3rd century commentary
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." Translation: "The more things change, the more they remain the same." - Traditional French saying
"Things never change the same." - Alice Hoeltke
"Life is about Being & Becoming" - Carl Rodgers
"If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation." - Tom Stoppard
"I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change." - Vice President Dan Quayle, 5/22/89
"Fall is my favourite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change colour and fall from the trees." - David Letterman
"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there." - Richard Feynman
"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." - Albert Einstein
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." - Winston Churchill
"What we call 'Progress' is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance." - Henry Havelock Ellis
"The great thing about television is that if something important happens anywhere in the world, day or night, you can always change the channel." - From "Taxi"
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." - Professor Irwin Corey
"Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them." -- Suzanne Necke
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Reinhold Niebuhr
"They say that time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself." - Andy Warhol
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Life is like a dogsled team. If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes." - Lewis Grizzard
"All things must change to something new, to something strange." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix." - Christina Baldwin
"Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives." - William James
"Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let's love turbulence and use it for change." - Ramsay Clark
"For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change." - Ingrid Bengis
"Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living." Miriam Beard
"Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better." - King Whitney, Jr.
"Even God cannot change the past." - Agathon
"It's not that some people have willpower and some don't. It's that some people are ready to change and others are not." - James Gordon, M.D.
"A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love." - Pearl Buck
"We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves." - Lynn Hall, Where Have All the Tigers Gone?, 1989
Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change." - Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965
"Change your thoughts and you change your world." - Norman Vincent Peale
"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." - Nelson Mandela, "A Long Walk to Freedom"
"Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me." - Carol Burnett
"Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work." - H. L. Hunt
"When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power." - Hugh White
"You are so young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as judge of the highest matters." - Plato
"Let us take things as we find them let us not attempt to distort them into what they are not. We cannot make facts. All our wishing cannot change them. We must use them." - John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change." - Andre Gide
"Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work." - H. L. Hunt
"We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance." - Harrison Ford
"In all things that involve social pressures, if we want to see change we have to force the envelope outwards." - Gary Lee Phillips
"We must become the change we want to see." - Mahatma Gandhi
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." - Winston Churchill
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew." - Abraham Lincoln
"It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power." - Alan Cohen
"Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal." - Albert Einstein
"No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow." - Alice Walker
"In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic." - Alvin Toffler
"It doesn't work to leap a twenty-foot chasm in two ten-foot jumps." - American proverb
"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations." - Anais Nin
"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death." - Anais Nin
"When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow." - Anais Nin
"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." - Anais Nin
"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." - Anne Frank
"Then, without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that a quiet conscience makes one strong." Anne Frank
"Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin
"The important thing is this To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become." - Charles DuBois
"If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong." - Charles Kettering
"... while we flatter ourselves that things remain the same, they are changing under our very eyes from year to year, from day to day." - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choices words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech." - Edwin H. Friedman
"People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." - Epictetus
"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." - Eric Hoffer
"We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it." - Felix Adler
"All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change." - G. K. Chesterton
"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." - General Eric Shinseki, [Chief of Staff, U. S. Army]
"I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better." - Georg C. Lichtenberg
"Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never were and say, "Why not?" - George Bernard Shaw
"The future has a way of arriving unannounced." - George Will
"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn." - Gloria Steinem
"If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?" - Gloria Steinem
"Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change." Harriet Lerner
"The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next." - Helen Keller
"To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." - Henri Bergson
"Things do not change, we change." - Henry David Thoreau
"Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them." - Henry Steele Commager
"You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing" Heraclitus, in. ca. 500 BCE
"All is flux; nothing stays still." - Heraclitus
"Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it all is one.
And yet everything comes in season." - Heraklietos of Ephesos
"Just because everything is different doesn't mean that everything has changed." - Irene Peter
"The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning." - Ivy Baker Priest
"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out." - James Baldwin
"The most successful people are those who are good at plan B." - James Yorke
"The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society." - John Dewey
"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." - John F. Kennedy
"A person needs at intervals to separate from family and companions and go to new places. One must go without familiars in order to be open to influences, to change." - Katharine Butler Hathaway
"The inability of those in power to still the voices of their own consciences is the great force leading to change." - Kenneth Kaunda
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." - Leo Tolstoy
"The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual - for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost." - M. Scott Peck
"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers." - M. Scott Peck
"The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it." - Marcus Aurelius
"Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
"We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing." - Maria Mitchell
"You really can change the world if you care enough." - Marian Wright Edelman
"If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it You just do it one step at a time." . Marian Wright Edelman
"It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear . . . . It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to." - Marilyn Ferguson
"We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth." - Mary Antin, 1912
"To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world -- that I am able to change it in positive ways." - Maxine Hong Kingston
"If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth." - Mitsugi Saotome
"The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything or nothing." Nancy Astor
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
"A man may fulfil the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve." Oliver Wendell Holmes
"All things change; nothing perishes." - Ovid
"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it." Pablo Picasso
"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." - Paulo Freire
"A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love." Pearl S. Buck
"You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea." Pearl S. Buck
"I am comforted by life's stability, by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us." - Pearl S. Buck
"Growth itself contains the germ of happiness." - Pearl S. Buck
"Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work -- on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself -- it must be organized for constant change." - Peter F. Drucker
"Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world." - Rachel Carson
"Life is a progress, and not a station." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation." - Robert F. Kennedy
"Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favour." - Robert Frost
"Learn wisdom from the ways of a seedling. A seedling which is never hardened off through stressful situations will never become a strong productive plant." - Stephen Sigmund
"You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it? How can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies in the return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return to has changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You will not incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The river has been flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same river." - Steven Foster, [The Book of the Vision Quest]
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." - Thomas Jefferson
"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed." - Thomas Jefferson
"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be." - Thomas a Kempis
"The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love."- Tom Robbins
"If we habitually focus on how to improve things that are already great, can you see how this spirit can transform ourselves, our organizations, families and communities?" - Tony Robbins
"He that never changes his opinions, never corrects his mistakes, and will never be wiser on the morrow than he is today." - Tryon Edwards

"Change is inevitable, except from vending machines." - Unknown
"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him." - Victor Frankl
"There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place." - Washington Irving
"We know what we are, but know not what we may be." - William Shakespeare
"If you want to make enemies, try to change something." - Woodrow Wilson

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