Quotes About Change

Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again;

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.

Perhaps it requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. Precisely these days of transition are perhaps the period when everything in you is working..

O trees of life, O when are you wintering? We are not unified. We have no instincts like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late, we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind, and fall down to an indifferent lake. We realise flowering and fading together. And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing, as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.

Ask no one to speak of you, not even contemptuously. And when time passes and you notice how your name is spreading around among people, don't take it more seriously than any of the other things you find on their lips. Think: your name has turned bad, and get rid of it. Take on another, any other, so that God can call you in the night. And conceal it from everyone.

There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life.

No feeling is final.

And many a day's hours were like that. As if someone fashioned my likeness somewhere in order to torment it slowly with needles. I felt each sharp prick of his playing, and it was: as if a rain fell on me in which all things change.

Amid these fading and decaying things, be the glass that rings out as it's breaking.

For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. (Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter dir, wie der Winter, der eben geht. Denn unter Wintern ist einer so endlos Winter, daß, überwinternd, dein Herz überhaupt übersteht.)

IMPERMANENCE Driftsand of the hours. Quietly disappearing, continuously, even the happily consecrated design. Life blows away, always: pillars already rise without connection, carrying nothing but empty air.

The leaves fall, fall as from far, Like distant gardens withered in the heavens; They fall with slow and lingering descent. And in the nights the heavy Earth, too, falls From out the stars into the Solitude. Thus all doth fall. This hand of mine must fall And lo! the other one:—it is the law. But there is One who holds this falling Infinitely softly in His hands. - Autumn

Each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but also alter the past within us.

Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

This humanity of woman, brought forth in pains and degradations, will come to light when she has shed the conventions of mere femininity in the alterations of her outward station, and the men who today do not feel it coming will be surprised and struck by it.

Who has turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude of someone going away? Just as that person on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley one last time, turns, stops, lingers - so we live, forever taking our leave.

The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.

This isn't how sickness was in childhood. A postponement. An excuse to grow up.

Don't you see that everything that happens is always a beginning again.

Rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and clam before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.

The future stands firm... but we move in infinite space.