Quotes About Change

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.

there is nothing bad to fear; once you have crossed that threshold, all is well. Another world, and you do not have to speak

But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?

Our winters are very long here, very long and very monotonous. But we don't complain about it downstairs, we're shielded against the winter. Oh, spring does come eventually, and summer, and they last for a while, but now, looking back, spring and summer seem too short, as if they were not much more than a couple of days, and even on those days, no matter how lovely the day, it still snows occasionally.

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...

However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them

Deceptions are more frequent than changes

If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.

One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.

If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the head, why bother reading it in the first place?.... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. --Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904

Other opportunities arise from time to time that almost don't accord with the overall situation, opportunities whereby a word, a glance, a sigh of trust may achieve more than a lifetime of exhausting endeavour.

There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.

A Little Fable Alas, said the mouse, the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must ...

You wouldn't believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it.

But that is past and should remain deep in the past

It is a long dark road from there to where I have really come

48 Belief in progress doesn't mean belief in progress that has already occurred. That would not require belief.

now I'm even losing my name - it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours

ALAS," said the mouse, "the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up. Translated

you've undergone a total metamorphosis