Quotes About Change

Give wind and tide a chance to change.

My hopes were high, and I looked every day for some change to take place. What it was to be I knew not, but that it would come I felt certain if I kept on. One day the chance came.

This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.

I sat back, allowing Wes's words to sink in. Then I responded, "I guess it's hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.

In the theatre you can change things ever so slightly; it's an organic thing. Whereas in film you only have that chance on the day, and you have no control over it at all.

Autumn is a reminder that while the leaves die and fall, there will always be Spring, a chance to replenish and be reborn again. We all have the opportunity to replenish ourselves, to be reborn.

Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people.

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.

I remember very clearly, at a time of enormous stress in my life, reading Alice in Wonderland. Alice became a heroine for me because she fell into this hole and she just free-fell. She didn't grab for the edges, she wasn't terrified, trying to stop her fall; she just fell and she looked at things as she went down. Then, when she landed, she was in a new place. She didn't take refuge in anything.

The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.

Thich Nhat Hanh says, "It's not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.

We don't like to have our basic assumptions challenged. It's too threatening.

That's what we're going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what we thought.

We fail to see that like the weather, we are fluid, not solid.

The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are continually falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety back together again.

Rather than living a life of resistance and trying to disprove our basic situation of impermanence and change, we could contact the fundamental ambiguity and welcome it. We don't like to think of ourselves as fixed and unchanging, but emotionally we're very invested in it. We simply don't want the frightening, uneasy discomfort of feeling groundless.

A fresh attitude starts to happen when we look to see that yesterday was yesterday, and now it is gone; today is today and now it is new. It is like that—every hour, every minute is changing. If we stop observing change, then we stop seeing everything as new. —DZIGAR KONGTRUL RINPOCHE

In the middle of the river, with the shoreline out of view, the raft begins to disintegrate. We find ourselves with absolutely nothing to hold on to. From our conventional standpoint, this is scary and dangerous. However, one small shift of perspective will tell us that having nothing to hold on to is liberating. We could have faith that we won't drown. Holding on to nothing means we can relax with this fluid, dynamic world.

All too frequently we relate like timid birds who don't dare to leave the nest.

The Facts of Life: Impermanence

If we make the journey to get security, we're completely missing the point.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.

We're always in an intermediate state between the past and the future, between the memory of what happened before and the approaching experience that will soon become memory as well.