Quotes About Change

But that's exactly the problem, retorted Isabel. We're all stuck with the same tired and trusted ideas. If we refused to entertain the possibility of something radically different, then we'd never make any progress - ever. We'd still be thinking that the sun revolved round the earth.

We shall change all that...because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed.

The ordinary you, the you that has to go to work every morning, the you that has to run a household, pay bills, do all of those things--that you is somehow changed into an exciting, artistic, fully alive you. That's what Paris does.

It was easy to make a difference to other people's lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.

Believe me, there's nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust.

You can't go through life saying "I hate mustard" because that is shutting off the possibility of change.

And that is why we must answer her hatred with love. I can't say whether it will change her in her heart - it probably won't. But if it makes her feel even just a little bit better about herself, she will be less envious.

Life happens, she thought; whatever we do, life just happens.

A change of oil…yes, that was what we all needed from time to time, whether we were an engine or a person. And there were other similarities to be explored. Engines had to be handled gently, as did people. Forward gears were better than reverse gears—for people as well as engines.

what is one thing today becomes quite another thing tomorrow.

Could you say that your business had expanded if it had gone from owning one teapot to two? Somehow she thought that Dr. Profit would answer both those questions with a shake of his head. Of course, she herself had expanded in girth since the agency was founded, but she did not think that such a form of growth was what the author of the article had in mind.

Nobody is so bad that there is no chance of change.

In her experience, the places one set off for were usually still there no matter when one arrived; it would be different, naturally enough, if towns, villages, houses moved—then one might have a real reason to hurry—but they did not.

Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down—or up, I suppose—replacing other people in the process.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow…There must be reasons why the leaves decay. (From Auden's If I Could Tell You

There was a great deal of progress being made, right under their noses, particularly in Africa, and this progress was good. Life was much harder for tyrants than it had been before.

because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what it is that has to be changed.

Es ist ein Zeichen geistiger Reife, seine Meinung zu ändern, wenn man merkt, dass man im Unrecht ist.

That place is the place we have always been, and if you think that where you have been is where you should be, then why go to another place that you do not know at all and may not be as good as the place you were in before somebody came along and said to you that you must go forwards—which is not what you wanted to do?

As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats.

We forget, she thought. We think that we were always the way we are now, but we were not. —

Most theories and ideologies claimed to explain the world, or some aspect of it, but did not in any real sense influence the world. Underneath everything, beneath the layers of explanation that we created, beneath all our elaborate protocols, people still did exactly as they wanted to do. In other words, you did not change human nature by inventing a theory of human nature.

Are we facing a new Dark Age, Angus? Possibly, Lou. A dark age in which our concentration spell is this long.

When she had lived in Bobonong the houses seemed perfectly normal to her and the house in which her family lived had seemed quite comfortable. But looking at it with eyes that had seen Gaborone, and the large buildings there, their house had seemed mean and cramped.