Quotes About Change

One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always re-creating yourself.

How easily, without noticing, a man finds himself parallel to the life he meant to have, then arrives, years later, to find the band gone, flowers dead, love past.

She [Kali] does according to her wisdom in destroying what is useless or what has lived its destined time.

Getting closer to home, is it a fully satisfying repentance if we only deal with the past, which cannot be changed? "Alas, what did I do?" I don't think so. Believers get closer to repentance instead by asking, "Alas, what kind of person was I that I could do that?

The emptiness of your knowing everything about things you want to change, can't change anything.

An intuitive definition is that a safe refactoring is one that doesn't break a program. Because a refactoring is intended to restructure a program without changing its behavior, a program should perform the same way after a refactoring as it does before.

Moving state and behavior between classes is the very essence of refactoring. As the system develops, you find the need for new classes and the need to shuffle responsibilities around. A design decision that is reasonable and correct one week can become incorrect in another. That is not a problem; the only problem is not to do something about it.

When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.

You can Change Your Organization or Change Your Organization

Architectural refactoring is hard, and we're still ignorant of its full costs, but it isn't impossible. Here the best

It's hard to figure out what the right amount of hiding is. Fortunately, with Hide Delegate (189) and Remove Middle Man, it doesn't matter so much. I can adjust my code as time goes on. As the system changes, the basis for how much I hide also changes. A good encapsulation six months ago may be awkward now. Refactoring means I never have to say I'm sorry—I just fix it.

Hitler destroyed the German university with design; we destroyed ours without.

Evolution is individual — devolution is collective.

The natural philosophers are mostly gone. We modern scientists are adding too many decimals.

Take a man out of the trenches, make him a straw boss, and he develops a belly.

It is not hard to learn more. What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong.

Social reform aims to improve the condition of the poor by worsening the condition of the rich.

Follow Descartes! Do not give up the religion of your youth until you get a better one.

The poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of Being.

Destiny requires you to follow the path you're on. But the path could be altered, if you set your mind to it. For me that meant holding out until the day when King Cnut owed me so much that he would have to award me an estate, land, and honor again.

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.

If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to.

In early 2007, in response to countless customer complaints, Brussels Airlines reluctantly altered the thirteen dots in their airline logo to fourteen.9 If you want to sit in the thirteenth row on your Air France, KLM, Iberia (or for that matter, Continental) flight, you're plain out of luck, as there isn't one.