Quotes About Change

We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.

It requires a hard look at what is, rather than what you hope will be. As you let go of managing and controlling, you must also let go of the idea that "when he changes I'll be happy." He may never change. You must stop trying to make him. And you must learn to be happy anyway.

it is this very practice of acceptance that allows another to change if he chooses to do so.

We all tend to believe that suffering is a mark of true love, that to refuse to suffer is selfish, and that if a man has a problem then a woman should help him change.

Cuando sucede algo emocionalmente doloroso y nos decimos que la culpa es nuestra, en realidad estamos diciendo que tenemos control sobre ello: si nosotros cambiamos, el dolor desaparecerá.

An apology might help, but you can change your life without one.

Condemnation feels good and it is now a staple of religion, politics, and the media (both left and right), but it changes nothing. Compassion, on the other hand, changes everything. (p. 121)

Venture outside your comfort zone. To stop growing is to stop living.

Cancer forced me out of my comfort zone. But the reality is that in life, there are no true comfort zones. Life comes at us in ways that we can't predict or control.

One aspect of soulful healing that is most challenging and therefore most fruitful is the need to release a part of your story that may be lying underneath and behind the illness. Healing requires a willingness to rewrite the story you tell yourself about what has happened in your life and why it's happened. There is often an emotional attachment to the pattern that doesn't allow for easy change.

Don't live the same year 75 times and call it a life.

Change is hardest at the beginning, messiest in the middle and best at the end.

Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge.

all the knowledge he needed in order to live was present in the land. His role was not to control or change the world as a human, but to learn from the world how to be human.

What does a good mother do when mothering time is done? As I stand in the water, my eyes brim and drop salt tears into the freshwater at my feet. Fortunately, my daughters are not clones of their mother, nor must I disintegrate to set them free, but I wonder how the fabric is changed when the release of daughters tears a hole. Does it heal over quickly, or does the empty space remain? And how do the daughter cells make new connections? How is the fabric rewoven?

The job is never over; it simply changes from one task to the next. What I'm looking for, I suppose, is balance, and that is a moving target. Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.

Their dad had just pulled up stakes, left the country—and us. He said that he no longer wanted a life with so much responsibility, so the responsibility was all mine.

Their success is measured not by consumption and growth, but by graceful longevity and simplicity, by persistence while the world changed around them. It is changing now.

It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance.

Paula Gunn Allen, in her book Grandmothers of the Light, writes of the changing roles of women as they spiral through the phases of life, like the changing face of the moon.

celebrate my freedom rather than mourn my loss.

But most mosses are immune to death by drying. For them, desiccation is simply a temporary interruption in life.

The landscape has changed, but the story remains.

If people only knew . . . then they would, what? Stop? I honor their faith in people, but so far the if-then formula isn't working. People do know the consequences of our collective damage, they do know the wages of an extractive economy, but they don't stop.