Quotes About Change

During our lives all of us will experience opportunities for change which involve risk. These occasions may come at inconvenient times. We may not act upon them, but the challenge is there for us. The purpose of reincarnation is the exercise of free will. Without this ability, we would be impotent creatures indeed.

Many people looking back on the effects of tragedy in their lives conclude that there was nothing else that would have been a strong enough motivation to change—that the most extreme suffering was needed to drive them toward their soul's mission.

Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.

Our moral and cultural traditions have not kept pace with our economic possibilities. We try to match new demands with a spiritual life not designed for them.

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you're not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise.

The New Republic had traded efficiency for democracy and oligarchy for bureaucracy—and had done so willingly and knowingly.

Certainty is eaten away by the thousand and one compromises that are the currency of democracy.

The trouble with travelling back later on is that you can never repeat the same experience.

No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except for the ones that succeed.

You evolve--cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day.

Eighty miles an hour, velocity becomes the measure of our progress, the speed of forgetting.

Days pass and years pass and you light the holy candle of yourself by the glimmer of someone else, and just when you think you're burned out on her, you realize that she's the single thing that raises you above yourself. And now she's dumped you flat and taken up with a lumberjack or that sensitive guy in town who runs the bookstore or the FedEx man who wears tight shorts in the summer. That guy? How could she?

as the American mind moves from the imprisoning whimsy of cities through some harder-boiled practicality to the eagle flight of the West.

All of these people, it was as if they were all turning to gold, all marked with an invisible X on their foreheads, as of course we are, too, the place and time yet to be determined. Yes, we are burning down; time is disintegrating.

Someday, of course, she would light out on her own, following her own riverbed, and though we'd follow as long as she allowed, and though we trusted she'd come and go from our lives with regularity, she would also be a half memory [...]

That's the thing about needs. Sometimes when you get them met, you don't need them anymore.

he seemed as right as rain when I saw him yesterday!" And that's what Pete and Joe said, too. Right as rain! And then I got to thinking. "That's how he was then," I said. "What's in your mind, Terry?" said Pete. "If he was fit as a fiddle one day, how come he was dead as a doornail the next?

As my boys got into their later teens, I found that upon occasion they did have fresh ideas that were better than my "old fashioned" way of doing things.

It's cool just because I've had this dream of changing the sport of swimming and it's finally happening.

This is my 20th year in the sport. I've known swimming and that's it. I don't want to swim past age 30 if I continue after this Olympics, and come back in 2016, I'll be 31. I'm looking forward to being able to see the other side of the fence.

I wish it were as easy to stop hating as it was to start.

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.