Quotes About Change

I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

No change in circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Throw a stone into the stream and the ripples that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.

Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.

Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places.

All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

Else if you would be a man speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.

I unsettle all things.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

The surest poison is time.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same

The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

What we fear of doing most is usually what we most need to do.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.

why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.