Quotes About Change

Virtually all animals—single-celled organisms as well as humans—are conditioned to react in predictable ways, some of which we can modify and some of which are more difficult to change.

Rice University found that people judge sounds that increase or decrease in pitch to be longer than sounds of the same duration and constant pitch. The direction of change does not matter. The amount of change drives the effect.

En el mundo de la pintura, todos esperaban innovaciones e ideas nuevas, pero, en el mundo de la música, con un entorno mucho más conservador, no había espacio para las nuevas ideas. El mundo de la música seguía obsesionado por una «música moderna» que tenía más de cincuenta años. Aquella reflexión supuso para mí un momento de liberación.

If you don't know what to do, there's actually a chance of doing something new.

It's not that the worm forgives the plough; it gives it no mind. (Pain occurs, in passing.) (lines 37-39 in the poem 'Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA')

In this unsettled world, it is good to have this steadiness—the Christmas Eve service, the peal of the bell, the star atop the Peacocks' silo, the saints burdened with concern. There is a holiness to memory, a sense of God's presence in these mangers of the mind. Which might explain why it is that the occasions that change the least are often the very occasions that change us the most.

I don't want to spend this last half [of life] trying to recapture the first. I want to stretch and grow and do bold things ... and question what I've been taught and generally alarm people with my broadmindedness.

Thus are the changes wrought in a man's life—that courage is treasured more than comfort and, in that choice, victory is gained.

Life, not lectures, inspires us to change.

Avoid those persons who claim always to have believed the same thing and demand you do the same. What they are really saying is that they have refused to permit their encounters with God to reshape their lives.

That was the problem with religion. You no sooner made up your mind about something than you had to change it.

I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled kuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes.

First to strike a visitor was the raucous music: strident jerking jazz, faster than anything that had gone before; it was the sound of speed. Yet more striking were the dancers: thin young women, diaphanous short skirts showing their legs, their heads crowned with iridescent feathers twitching in time to the music. To those used to Strauss waltzes, these 'flappers' seemed to be suffering from some new nervous disorder.

By and by we shall have balloons and pass over to Europe between sun and sun. Oh, for the good old days of heavy post-coaches and speed at the rate of six miles an hour!

something is fated to occur, then no matter how hard one tries to change this, what good will it do?' Above they use this doctrine to persuade the kings, dukes, and great officials and below they deploy it to interfere with work of the people.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.

Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.

Overthrow the bureaucracy, and return to a system based on human responsibility.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas," John Maynard Keynes famously observed, "but in escaping from the old ones.

I shrugged. "Staying in a hotel is a bit like life. At some stage you have to check out." "Oh

Today's freedom fighters are tomorrow's dictators.

How did it ever get to be that bad? I think something happened to Germany after the Great War. You could see it on the streets of Berlin. A callous indifference to human suffering.

Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933. And as I'm always saying, 'Who isn't a National Socialist when there's a gun pointed at his head?