Quotes about change

page 19

“Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”

“The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in a single, solitary, even humble individual. For it is within the soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.”

“It's not easy being so frightened of everything. And when I think of how much I've improved in the last year, I wonder when I'll ever get finished with making changes and be really grown up.”

“And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. this relationship will probably lead to nothing… this didn't change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea…”

“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”

“people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.”

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

“The key to friendship with God, he said, is not changing what you do, but changing your attitude toward what you do.”

“If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior… you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”

“Either things grow and change or they die.”

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”

“In reality, you don’t ever change the hurricane. You just learn how to stay out of its path.”

“The past was gone. Nothing could change what had already been. Looking back at it, letting its wounds fester, indulging in regret was just a different, slower way to die. The living moved forward.”

“It was wise enough to know itself, and brave enough to BE itself, and wild enough to change itself while somehow staying altogether true.”

“I'm sure that whatever changed is only temporary. It will change again.”

“Faith is not Desire. Faith is Will. Desires are things that need to be satisfied, whereas Will is a force. Will changes the space around us,…”

“It doesn’t take time to change once you understand the problem… Somebody hands you a rattlesnake, it doesn’t take long to drop it, does it?”

“If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed”

“They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives…”

“Accept what you can not change-change that which is unacceptable.”

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

“One day spent with someone you love can change everything.”

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

“The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking… the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)”

“They say that nameless things change constantly—that names fix them in place like pins.”

“We 're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren 't we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we'll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that's all" - Lucretia Mott in The Invention of Wings
― Sue Monk Kidd”

“It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory, but when you succeed, you start to realize that you’re capable of far more than you imagined. You live in this vast body called the Universe, which contains all the solutions and all the problems. Visit your soul; don’t visit your past. The Universe goes through many mutations and carries the past with it. We call each of those mutations a ‘life,’ but just as the cells in your body change and yet you remain the same, so time does not pass, it merely changes.”

“Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to stay the same?”

“How much change can a person absorb before everything loses meaning Living for its own sake isn't life. People need meaning as much as they need air.”

“The front door shut, leaving Alec sitting in the half-lit garden, alone. He closed his eyes for a moment, the image of a face hovering behind his lids. Not Jace's face, for a change. The eyes set in the face were green, slit-pupiled. Cat eyes.”

“Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.”

“But you've changed,' I whisper. 'Haven't you?'
It is the scorpian's nature to sting. Just because he has no opportunity doesn't mean that he cannot.”

“Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and turn headlong down an immutable course.”

“But like everything else, love changed.”

“You've changed," he said. "You're-uh-"
"Yes?"
"Taller."
"I hope so. I was ten the last time you saw me."
"And your hair's really dark now-and short," he added.”

“It's much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody.”

“Everyone has a past, but that's just it--it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it.”

“Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!”

“I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.”

“The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.”

“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn’t matter. The world has been changed nonetheless.”

“You think I'm deranged! How refreshing. Everyone here takes me so seriously, it's a wonderful change to be thought mentally deficient.”

“In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.”

“We are all flawed, my dear. Every one of us. And believe me, we've all made mistakes. You've just got to take a good hard look at yourself, change what needs to be changed, and move one, pet.”

“But a risk-free life wasn't much of a life, really, and if she was going to change, she might as well start now.”

“People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them.”

“The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.”

“Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.”

“The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.”

“I knew right then and there nothing was ever going to change. It wouldn't matter if I was tall or short or fat or thin or absent every day. I was a loser from birth.”

“Do not act meanly, do not be unkind, because the time for setting things right may pass before your heart changes course.
Isabel Dalhousie”

“We must ask ourselves these questions as often as we dare. How will the world change if we do not question it?”

“The only thing that never changes is that everything changes.”

“Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.”

“They weren't lying. They firmly believed it all. Which doesn't change the facts.”

“People don't change. There are two kinds of people in the world: winners and losers. Black and white. I don't know where gray fits in, or if you can even live in that shade.”

“You can’t save others from themselves because those who make a perpetual muddle of their lives don’t appreciate your interfering with the drama they’ve created. They want your poor-sweet-baby sympathy, but they don’t want to change.”

“You've maddened me for you… have changed everything. So, I'm going to f*ck you long and hard, beauty, because if I'm to be enslaved by you-I want to be your master as well.”

“Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.”

“The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for.”

“To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.”

“Rafe didn't just flirt-he charmed girls right up to the point where they fell for him, then he changed his mind. I called him a player with attention deficit disorder.”

“If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.”

“What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts”

“It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.”

“here, here is my dark world. you carry it for a change. im out”

“I don't want to change anything, because I don't know how to deal with change.”

“Try to realize it's all within yourself,
No one else can make you change.
And to see you're really only very small
And life flows in within you and without you.”

“The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.”

“Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here”

“I remember you saying that growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change. I guess that means I've grown up now…”

“The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”

“Donʹt worry now about what you canʹt change. Rest when you can so youʹll be ready for tomorrowʹs battles”

“I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. I think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.”

“There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.”

“Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”

“I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”

“I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.”

“I grasped two things: I wasn't as happy as I could be, and my life wasnt going to change unless I made it change.”

“If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.”

“Change is a funny thing. We never are quite sure what we are becoming or even why. Then one day we look at ourselves and wonder who we are and how we got that way. Only one thing about change remains constant… it is always painful”

“If voting changed anything, it would be made illegal”

“Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming — well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate. Isn’t that true?”

“Although there is no progress without change, not all change is progress.”

“Forever [is] so many different things. It is always changing… it is twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wish would last and last”

“Also, one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.”

“I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

“I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.”

“No marriage stays in the same pattern forever. It is both the best feature of marriage and the worst, that it inevitably changes.”

“I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.”

“Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.”

“Traits don't change, states of mind do.”

“Appreciation can make a day - even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary.”

“Relationships are never static. They have to evolve over time as the individuals in them change.”

“But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on.”

“You know how hind-sight is 20/20? Love is when you look back and wouldn't change anything.”

“Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.”