Quotes About Change

Reality is a sliding door.

Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today.

Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known.

Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.

Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age

Permanence is but a word of degrees.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, ? is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

The point of imperfection which we occupy -- is it on the way up or down?

This surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding.

Conservatives and Progressives. These two parties, which divide our government—and every other government—have been fighting for control of the world from the very beginning. History is the chronicle of their battles: between nobles and commoners, rulers and rebels, old traditions and new ideas, the rich and the poor. As the world turns, one side gets the upper hand, then the other, and back again. Only the names change.

Wherever a man comes, there comes a revolution. The old is for slaves.

I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.

Each moment of the year has its own beauty

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.

A materialist would argue that I'm a product of my circumstances. But I make my own circumstances. If I make a change in my dominant thoughts or motives, a change in my situation and surroundings will soon follow. Through my actions, I attract people and situations to match my mentality. As I am, so I act; and as I act, so I attract.

Time like space, is part of the permanent context of life. Time does not pass, we pass.

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.

I think that our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced.