Quotes About Change

Society acts like an ocean: after some great accident, it regains it's flat surface, it's usual flow, and erases it's trace of agitation of it's unsatisfied interests.

Is it not necessary, in order to produce the slightest change, that the most daring dreams of the past century become the most trite ideas of the present one?

We live in an age, madame, when nothing is sure," he said. "Even thrones rise and fall in France with fearful rapidity. Fifteen years have wreaked their will on a great empire, a monarchy, and a revolution. No one can now dare to count upon the future. You know my attachment to the cause of legitimacy. Suppose some catastrophe; would you not be glad to have a friend in the conquering party?" "Undoubtedly," she said, smiling.

Lucien ne reconnut pas sa Louise dans cette chambre froide, sans soleil, à rideaux passés, dont le carreau frotté semblait misérable, où le meuble était usé, de mauvais goût, vieux ou d'occasion. Il est en effet certaines personnes qui n'ont plus ni le même aspect ni la même valeur, une fois séparées des figures, des choses, des lieux qui leur servent de cadre. Les

Even in a place of sorrow, time passes. Even in a place of joy. Do not assume that either keeps life from continuing,

You should not expect a monster to change, even at the end of a fairy tale. For in a children's story, the monster must be killed. If he remains alive, his nature will be limned. There is no gentling of an abomination.

Novelty is both delightful and deceptive.

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

Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.

Strange, now, how after so many years my mother's model is starting to recede. Before I became a mother, I was a motherless daughter, and "motherless" always overshadowed "daughter" in that phrase. Now I'm a motherless mother, and "mother" is the word that carries most of the weight. Early loss influences me, daily, but it doesn't define me anymore.

I know you feel too big for this place. But when you get out of here, you'll see how small you are in the world.

just as tunes once gay inevitably become plaintive when the generation that first sang them has turned to dust?

He could not stand people saying, "Who knows what we shall be doing this time next year?" and he loathed such expressions as "for the last time," "never again"..

and so convinced are we that each mood while it lasts will be the permanent temper of our soul

Reason is only a drug, and its effects cannot be permanent.

Then the trees, after their long silence, began to talk again, in yellow and red.

the sun would set, and then our riders could watch the actual process of colour fading from the world. Was that tree still really green, or was it only that they were remembering how a few seconds ago it had been green?

He says to me, Ranulph, he says... that the past will never come again, but that we must remember that the past is made of the present, and that the present is always here.

It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use.

A heart well prepared for adversity in bad times hopes, and in good times fears for a change in fortune.

They change their clime, not their disposition, who run across the sea.

Years, following years, steal something every day; At last they steal us from ourselves away.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

I am not what I was in the reign of the good Cinara. Forbear, cruel mother of sweet loves.