Quotes About Change

Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it "conversion" or "repentance.

We moved from wondering to answering, which has not served us well at all.

One has to wonder, do we really want people to grow, or do we just want to be in control of the moment?

We do not think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

Unless we find the communal meaning and significance of the suffering of all life and ecosystems on our planet, we will continue to retreat into our individual, small worlds in our quest for personal safety and sanity. Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with. Think about that.

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change. It will think up a thousand other things to be concerned about or be moralistic about—anything rather than giving up "who I think I am" and "who I need to be to look good.

Resurrection" is another word for change, but particularly positive change—which we tend to see only in the long run. In the short run, it often just looks like death.

You do not think yourself into a new way of living as much as you live your way into a new way of thinking.

To quote Archimedes once again, you must have both "a lever and a place to stand" before you can move the world. The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand, with either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities.

You normally have to let go of the old and go through a stage of unknowing or confusion, before you can move to another level of awareness or new capacity.

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.

If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!

Carl Jung, in his Collected Works (8, 784): "We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.

As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name

Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.

New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.

No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.

We don't think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.

What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age. —CARL JUNG No wise person ever wanted to be younger. —NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM