Quotes About Change

Now there are times when a whole generation is caught...between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence." —Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf.

The reason why we believe that change is possible is not because we are idealists but because we believe we have made it, so other people can make it as well.

Seismic change can happen over a lifetime, or in an instant.

He gave up. He'd been feeling like giving up for a long, long time. I guess it's maturity, they say it always gets you in the end. I don't seem to have any more principles left, so it's got to be maturity... A broken man, I guess that's what you become, the moment you are no longer a kid.

You are the only man I ever respected,' she said. 'But you haven't aged well. You have stayed young. Men who stay young don't age well.

La vie est pavée d'occasions perdues.

No doubt about it: numbers are the future. The world's been learning to count since the days of chivalry ended and it's only going to get worse. We're about to witness the end of everything that isn't quantifiable—honor, for example.

Humor is a silent and polite dynamite which enables you to blow your own way of life sky-high every time you have had enough of it, yet with the maximum discretion and without making a mess.

During all those years, you know, in the maquis, I was always asking myself whether it was for liberty, for France, that I was risking my life, or whether it was simply to keep up my self-image. Give me a whiskey, will you? I sat down. — Anyhow, I am not going to change that image.

Look here, my friend, for three years I was a bus conductor in Paris. I recommend it during rush hours; it gave me what you might call a knowledge of human nature — a good, solid knowledge which prompted me to change sides and go over to the elephants. I hope that'll do for you, as an explanation.

I'm a man of honor, Lili; of honor. — Yes, and the world ain't what it used to be, is it Colonel? — But I haven't changed, Lili, I refuse to change. I won't throw in the sponge.

Buvau jaunas, jaunesnis nei maniau. Ir vis d?lto mano naivumas buvo jau senas ir be iliuzij?. Ties? pasakius, jis amžinas: ?žvelgiu j? kiekvienoje naujoje kartoje, pradedant 1947 met? Sen Žermen de Pr? "žiurk?mis" ir baigiant Kalifornijos beat generation , pas kuriuos kartais apsilankau, nes man smagu kitose vietose ir kituose veiduose atpažinti grimasas, kurias darydavau dvidešimtmetis.

nors beveik vis? m?s? šiandien jau neb?ra gyv?, mes likome linksmi ir dažnai susitinkame gyvi jaun? mus supan?i? žmoni? žvilgsniuose.

C'est fini, Gary Cooper. Fini pour toujours. Fini, l'Américain tranquille, sûr de lui et de son droit, qui est contre les méchants, toujours pour la bonne cause, et qui fait triompher la justice et gagne toujours à la fin. Adieu l'Amérique des certitudes.

Ce qu'il y a en effet de frappant dans l'« accélération de l'histoire » que nous vivons, c'est que cette vitesse vertigineuse à laquelle le monde court vers l'avenir s'accompagne d'une absence de contrôle sur la direction de marche.

Progress always slows down before picking up again.

But perhaps there are points about which one never grows old. And it is no more agreeable at sixty-three to feel that a young woman no longer considers you a man than it is at sixteen to feel that she still considers you a child.

For centuries those people were hunters, and now hunting has been taken away from them, without anything taking its place. When you separate people from their past without giving them anything in its place, they live with their eyes on that past . . . They're not the ones to blame.

He felt sad, angry and sorry. It was impossible to let the people benefit fully from scientific and ideological progress without first raising the level of cultural awareness of the masses. They had to discard all the traditional molds that were still narrowing their minds.

An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice.

Il fut donc à la fois profondément rassuré et attristé lorsqu'il atteignirent la camionnette et qu'ils purent monter et démarrer sans qu'un seul coup de feu fût tiré. C'était, par une fois, une révolution authentique et nouvelle, qui méritait de gagner et de durer, comme celle de Juan Bosch, mais qui allait perdre, parce qu'elle était trop belle. Elle allait durer ce que durent les roses.

There must be a trick behind it, a dishonest trick, something crooked, something political, something they can understand. They're so used to sniffing at their own behinds that when someone wants to get a breath of fresh air, to turn at last to something different and more important, and threatened, something that's got to be saved at all costs, it's quite beyond them.

Humor is a passive form of terrorism, of resistance, and of pseudo-aggression that has less to do with changing the world than with mental hygiene. It is self-therapy...

She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She never cried because she was afraid that something 'would' happen; she would cry because she feared something that could render the world more beautiful, 'would not' happen.