Quotes About Change

Any hope that you can know yourself without accepting the things about you that you wish were not true is an illusion. Reality must be embraced before it can be changed. Our knowing of ourselves will remain superficial until we are willing to accept ourselves as God accepts us—fully and unconditionally, just as we are.

Paradoxically, no one can change until they first accept themselves as they are. Self-deceptions and an absence of real vulnerability block any meaningful transformation. It is only when I accept who I am that I dare to show you that self in all its vulnerability and nakedness. Only then do I have the opportunity to receive your love in a manner that makes a genuine difference.

Growth, unlike aging, is not an automatic consequence of

Our failures to live up to even our own expectations and ideals are massive. Our failures to live up to God's expectations are profound. Jesus knew this. This is why his call to leave everything, follow him and experience true life is so striking. It puts us in touch with the reality of our inner world, and it makes us aware of the depth of our longing for real change.

Although history may therefore seem like a series of inevitable events, the actual future is seldom foreseen.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society—its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its key institutions—rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time. —Peter Drucker

We used to think the world was so big. So indestructible. So fun. We still can't completely believe that it is as small and serious, as threatened and vulnerable, as we have made it.

One of the reasons people steer clear of environmentalism is all the guilt associated with it. The creepy feeling that by doing what everyone else in one's society is doing - driving, washing the dishes, catching a flight - we are bringing about the end of the world.

It's about the quality of the worry," I said. "I have happier worries now than I used to.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. —CARL JUNG

I lost my spinal column a good many years ago. There ain't no surgery can put it back. Even if there was, I wouldn't want it. I like it better this way. More comfortable.

Capitalism, he noted, is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn't have capitalism anymore.

There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.

If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.

Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we're wrong, we might well get a lot closer.

This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the ????óÏ' (Kairos) – the right time – for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.

A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization

Fascination with the question of social inequality was relatively new in the 1700s, and it had everything to do with the shock and confusion that followed Europe's sudden integration into a global economy, where it had long been a very minor player.

The one thing we can be confident of is that history is not over, and that wherever the most exciting new ideas of the next century come from, it will almost certainly be from someplace we don't expect.

One problem with evolutionism is that it takes ways of life that developed in symbiotic relation with each other and reorganizes

So what are people actually referring to when they talk about "deregulation"? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean "changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like.

Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people's lives quite sporadically, and for many people in history, it was not at all clear whose government they were actually in. Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter.

The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?

We are living in what the Greeks called the ????óÏ' (Kairos) – the right time – for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.' C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1958)