Address at Princeton University, "The Educated Citizen" (22 March 1954).
Variant: It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
"If I Were Twenty-One" in Coronet (December 1955).
This has also been paraphrased "What matters most is not the years in your life, but the life in your years" and misattributed to Abraham Lincoln and Mae West
Context: All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. All change is the result of a change in the contemporary state of mind. Don't be afraid of being out of tune with your environment, and above all pray God that you are not afraid to live, to live hard and fast. To my way of thinking it is not the years in your life but the life in your years that count in the long run. You'll have more fun, you'll do more and you'll get more, you'll give more satisfaction the more you know, the more you have worked, and the more you have lived. For yours is a great adventure at a stirring time in the annals of men.
“Change is the end result of all true learning.”
“Nothing is so unpopular as positive change amongst friends.”
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 148
Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 37
“Although there is no progress without change, not all change is progress.”
Source: Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court
Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 218, as cited in: Granville Stanley Hall, Edward Bradford Titchener, Karl M. Dallenbach (1937) The American journal of psychology. Vol. 50, p. 374.
Introduction
Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science (2008)
Source: Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), p. 336
Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 1.
Book XXIX, line 1
Translations, Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1773)
O degli uomini inferma e instabil mente!
Come siàn presti a variar disegno!
Tutti i pensier mutamo facilmente,
Più quei che nascon d’amoroso sdegno.
Canto XXIX, stanza 1 (tr. J. Hoole)
Orlando Furioso (1532)
