Quotes About Change

When I let go of what I am,' said the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, 'I become what I might be.

The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it, the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.

My mind is racing to understand. This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can't quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn't know how to close itself.

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes.

to be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act

Change doesn't just happen by focusing on the place that you want to escape. It happens by focusing on the place where you want to reach

S'il y a une issue, une issue qui ne soit pas la mort elle-même, alors elle passe par les mots. Mais plutôt que de quitter totalement l'esprit, les mots nous aident à quitter UN esprit et nous donnent les outils pour en bâtir un autre, similaire mais meilleur, proche de l'ancien mais avec des fondations plus fermes, et souvent avec une meilleure vue.

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

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.

Happy moments can turn into pain, given time

Sometimes, the only way to learn is to live

seemed the more lives she lived, the harder it was to feel at home anywhere.

Too many memories. Too many ghosts. It was time to be someone else again. I suppose the way I understand my life is as a kind of Russian doll, with different versions inside other versions, each one enclosing the other, whereby the life before isn't seen from the outside but is still there.

Moments ago she had been in the garden with Ash and Nora and Plato, a garden humming with life and love, and now she was here.

Her yaÅŸam milyonlarca seçim ihtiva eder. Kimi büyük, kimi küçük. Fakat bir karar?n yerine baÅŸka bir karar geçtiÄŸinde, bütün sonuçlar deÄŸiÅŸir. DönüÅŸü olmayan bir sapma gerçekleÅŸir ve bu da baÅŸka sapmalara yol açar.

you could die in that life, but you won't have died before you enter the life because this Midnight Library is not one of ghosts. It is not a library of corpses. It is a library of possibility. And death is the opposite of possibility.

In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself. There is nothing new it needs to notice about your bedroom. No potential external threats, just internal ones. By forcing yourself into a new physical space, preferably in a different country, you end up inevitably focusing a bit more on the world outside your head

For all his age and intelligence, Hendrich was fundamentally immature. He was a child. (…) we were just old. And that, in cases such as Hendrich, it didn't really matter how many years (…) had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

There is no rejection, there is only redirection. You can have everything and feel nothing.

Each twig has travelled only one journey. But there are still other twigs. And there are also other todays. Other lives that would have been different if you'd taken different directions earlier in your life. This is a tree of life.

an anchor fixes you in one place. And I am still not fixed. Could I just keep sailing through life for ever feeling like this? A boat has to stop eventually. It has to reach a port, a harbour, a destination, known or unknown. It has to get somewhere, and stop there, or what is the point of the boat?

While the Midnight Library stands, Nora, you will be preserved from death. Now, you have to decide how you want to live.

Life is "understood backward; but it must be lived forward" (Søren Kierkegaard)

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