Quotes About Change

When religion and royalty are destroyed the people will attack the nobles; after the nobles, the rich.

Peter the Hermit, Calvin, and Robespierre, each at an interval of three hundred years and all three from the same region, were, politically speaking, the Archimedean screws of their age, at each epoch a Thought which found its fulcrum in the self-interest of mankind.

Marriage must ceaselessly combat a monster that devours everything: habit.

Marriage must constantly fight against a monster which devours everything: routine.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances. The superior man espouses events and circumstances in order to guide them. If there were principles and fixed laws, nations would not change them as we change our shirts and a man can not be expected to be wiser than an entire nation.

I do not share the belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man's improvement in himself.

If laws and principles were fixed and invariable, nations would not change them as readily as we change our shirts.

The savage has only impulse; the civilized man has impulses and ideas. And in the savage the brain retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at the mercy of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the civilized man, ideas sink into the heart and change it; he has a thousand interests and many feelings, where the savage has but one at a time.

Le char de la civilisation, semblable à celui de l'idole de Jaggernaut, à peine retardé par un cœur moins facile à broyer que les autres et qui enraye sa roue, l'a brisé bientôt et continue sa marche glorieuse.

El amor pasa por transformaciones infinitas antes de mezclarse para siempre con nuestra vida y de teñirse para siempre de su color de llama. El secreto de esta infusión imperceptible se escapa al análisis del artista.

Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry.

Those few hours had bleached her; she had lost a woman's last glow of autumn color. Her eyes were red and swollen, nothing of their beauty remained, nothing looked out of them save her bitter and exceeding grief; it was as if a gray cloud covered the place through which the sun had shone.

Enfin, hormis le nombre des personnages, en remplaçant le loto par le whist, et en supprimant les figures de monsieur et de madame Grandet, la sc?ne, par laquelle commence cette histoire, était ? peu pr?s la m?me que par le passé. La meute poursuivait toujours Eugénie et ses millions; mais la meute plus nombreuse aboyait mieux, et cernait sa proie avec ensemble.

We want our Utopia now.

Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.

The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.

Revolution has become a sort of violent and hollow routine.

Just let your light shine! That's about all you have to do. One of the things that this far-out righteous cat named Krishnamarti says is that you don't change the world, you change yourself. The world is a projection of yourself and you change the world around you.... That's how the world gets changed. (Gridley)

'I wish for a better life. I wish for food for my children. I wish that sexual abuse and exploitation in schools would stop.' This is the dream of the African girl.

We go into rural communities, and all we do — like has been done in this room [at TED] — is create the space. When these girls sit … you unlock great leaders.

It's long since I've gone to the East Mountains. How many seasons have the tiny roses bloomed? White clouds - unblown - fall apart. In whose court has the bright moon dropped?

All this is gone forever - events, men. everything slips away, like the ceaseless waves of the Yangtze that vanish into the sea.

Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly, And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking. Which was the real - the butterfly or the man ? Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things? The water that flows into the depth of the distant sea Returns in time to the shallows of a transparent stream. The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city, Was once the Prince of the East Hill. So must rank and riches vanish. You know it, still you toil and toil - what for?