Quotes About Change

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.

Family traditions that hinder your ability to love, understand, and succeed are false—they

if they're willing to recognize their patterns and change them. When they're willing to see the truth and alter their beliefs, they can create new opportunities for themselves and their descendants. Until then, they may feel as if they're victims in a world they can't control, trying to make more money but barely getting by.

Albert Einstein once stated: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." It is not until we understand our limited thinking that we can choose to alter it and ourselves.

We're tied to our heritage in a powerful way, and if we want to change our individual behavior or beliefs and heal ourselves, knowledge about our history becomes perhaps the most important data we need. In order to move forward, we must know what our forebears have passed on to us and what they've communicated to each other, both consciously and unconsciously, throughout the years.

As the saying goes, "If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got." If we're finding it hard to fulfill our needs, there's something within us (most likely a thought process or belief governed by fear) that needs to change so that we can create a different reality.

People don't grow old. When they stop growing, they become old.

If there is anything natural and inevitable about the aging process, it cannot be known until the chains of our old beliefs are broken.

What Walter thinks is that people are like rivers. We never stay in the same place but jest keep flowing along, learning new stuff and picking up new experiences and changing all the time. So today's you isn't the same as yesterday's you and won't be the same as tomorrow's you. But Walter also thinks that there's a real perfect you that you're always trying to get to, and the better you are at living your life, the closer you come to it.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.

People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.

Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.

Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.

There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.

The backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning. The world has changed profoundly, and it needs to change far more.

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.

You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center.

Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?

Paul Goodman famously wrote, "Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!

He ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.

Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.