Quotes About Change

We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.

The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.

Drifting is what one does

The statement "To travel is better than to arrive" comes back to mind again and stays. We have been traveling and now we will arrive. For me a period of depression comes on when I reach a temporary goal like this and have to reorient myself toward another one.

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on "good" rather than "time" and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.

We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences.

We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know.

Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.

as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.

I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.

Some say the good is found in happiness. But how do we know what happiness is and how can happiness be defined? If happiness and good are not objective terms, we cannot deal with them scientifically and since they aren't objective, they just exist in your mind, so if you want to be happy, you just change your mind. Ha ha ha.

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness. The trouble is that the expansion has to be made at the roots, not at the branches, and that's what makes it hard to see.

Il posto per migliorare il mondo è innanzitutto nel proprio cuore, nella propria testa e nelle proprie mani; è da qui che si può partire verso l'esterno.

If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory

Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren't necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.

In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.

In the West we nearly all have strong moral intuitions about the wrongness of slavery, child labor, or animal cruelty. But that sure didn't used to be the case. Their wrongness has become an implicit moral intuition, a gut instinct concerning moral truth, only because of the fierce moral reasoning (and activism) of those who came before us, when the average person's moral intuitions were unrecognizably different. Our guts learn their intuitions.

We have multiple dichotomies in our heads, and ones that seem inevitable and crucial can, under the right circumstances, have their importance evaporate in an instant.

The subject is also fascinating because of the nature of the revisionism—neuroplasticity radiates optimism. Books on the topic are entitled The Brain That Changes Itself, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, and Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life, hinting at the "new neurology

Robert M. Sapolsky