Quotes About Change

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

The gospel is not just the illustration (even the best illustration) of an idea. It is the story of actions by which the human situation is irreversibly changed.

I have listened to young Indians who said, "Christianity taught me to believe in the possibility of a different world; Marxism showed me how to get it." It does not take more than a generation to discover that Marxism necessarily betrays the hopes by which it lives.

It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world.

Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

This is the flag of the future, but it does not dishonor the past. (On his country's new Maple Leaf flag)

Stalin's dethronement meant not only the collapse of one authority, but that of a whole institution.

Marxism does not provide any specific method of solving questions that Marx did not put to himself or that did not exist in his time. If his life had been prolonged for ninety years he would have had to alter his views in ways that we have no means of conjecturing.

the historian treats ideas seriously and does not regard them as completely subservient to events and possessing no life of their own (for in that case there would be no point in studying them), but he does not believe that they can endure from one generation to another without some change of meaning.

like all over-thrown Communist leaders he became a democrat as soon as he was ousted from power.

With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is "in principle" an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.

I was then a young and omniscient student (alas, I was soon to lose both these virtues).

Mas a vida tinha lá seus mistérios e suas surpresas: nenhum de nós naquela casa voltaria a ser o mesmo de antes, nem os risos nunca mais soariam tão leves e límpidos, nunca mais aquelas vozes todas reunidas na mesma sala, nunca mais.

Each was changed in himself, and yet each thought the other only changed, himself the same.

Every age has its characteristic, and our present one is not behind its predecessors in that respect ; it is the age of systems, every system enforced by a treatise.

Grief, after all, is like smoking in a damp country — what was at first a necessity becomes afterwards an indulgence.

The past was once the future, and it wrought In the high presence of on-looking thought ; All that we have, was by its efforts brought.

The same, yet not the same

There are in existence two periods when we shrink from any great vicissitude—early youth and old age. In the middle of life, we are indifferent to change ; for we have discovered that nothing is, in the end, so good or so bad as it at first appeared.

Pandemics tell a lot about your happiness. The question is that if pandemic was to hit us again, where would you like to be? The rest is easy, you just start walking. Otherwise you are happy

Gays are now allowed to serve openly in the military. So maybe our next war could be a musical.

I love autumn in New York City: The yellows, the browns, and the rust -- and that's just the drinking water.... Here in New York City, the leaves turn -- and run.

New York City has 2 million rats. We used to have 8 million rats. Now we're down to 2 million. You know what that means? We lose four electoral votes.

Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.