quotations about change
Things do not change; we change.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
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
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
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Parable of the Talents
You can't change the world
But you can change the facts
And when you change the facts
You change points of view
If you change points of view
You may change a vote
And when you change a vote
You may change the world
DEPECHE MODE
"New Dress"
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
There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Smiley's People
If you wish to be happy, think not of what is to come nor of that which you have no control over but rather of the now and of that which you are able to change.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Brisingr
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
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
We pay for every change we make ... and we pay just as dearly if we refuse to change.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
Those who object to what is new are controlled by the love of what is old.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Change", Reactions and Other Essays
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"
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
The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
MAYA ANGELOU
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The world's a scene of changes, and to be
Constant, in Nature were inconstancy.
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Inconstancy
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
Lasting change can only come from within.
AHSOKA TANO
"The Academy", Star Wars: The Clone Wars
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
Strong communities ... embrace change. New discoveries require us to think differently and approach things differently, to think anew.
TOM VILSACK
speech, Jan. 10, 2006