Quotes About Change

As civilisation advances, so does indifference.

Sometimes, to be yourself you will have to forget yourself and become something else. Your character is not a fixed thing. You will sometimes have to move to keep up with it.

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.

Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve, you should know that by now.

Sometimes things are a change for the better and the worse at the same time, like the internet. Or the electric keyboard. Or pre-chopped garlic. Or the theory of relativity.

In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved. And replaced by even bigger myths.

It wasn't just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.

And yet, when everything is alien the alien becomes familiar.

This is the whole stupid thing about all these unblood relationships. They depend on people staying the same, standing in the same spot they were in over a decade ago, when they first met. Surely the reality is that connections between people aren't permanent, but fleeting and random, like a solar eclipse or clouds meeting in the sky. They exist in a constantly moving universe full of constantly moving objects.

The longer you live, the more you realize that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realize their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their world views challenged and disproved. Everyone would realize the thing that defines a human being is being a human.

once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about. —Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.

Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try

Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don't even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.

It looks like she is standing still but actually she is walking. She is breaking out of the chains of the past. Of slavery. Of civil war. And she is heading towards liberty. But she is caught for ever in that moment of stopped time. Look, can you see? Stop looking at the torch and look at her feet. She's moving, but not moving. Heading towards a better future, but not quite there yet.

Language gives us the power to voice our experience, to reconnect with the world, and to change our own and other people's lives

When you stay too long in one place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

There is no point spending an entire life trying to win the love you didn't feel when you needed it. You sometimes just have to let go of an old story and start your own. Give yourself some love. You can't change the past. You can't change other people. You can change you though. You narrate this story. So start to write a new chapter.

Maybe instead of worrying about upgrading technology and slowly allowing ourselves to be cyborgs we should have a little peek at how we could upgrade our ability to cope with all this change.

I feel a swell of pride. This. This right here is why I wanted to become a teacher. To know that it is possible to change the world for the better, in however small a way.

Progress,' wrote C.S. Lewis, 'means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.

Remember that the key thing about life on earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts.

One thing mental illness taught me is that progress is a matter of acceptance. Only by accepting a situation can you change it. You have to learn not to be shocked by the shock. Not to be in a state of panic about the panic. To change what you can change and not get frustrated by what you can't.