Quotes About Change

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, "always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.

We have to let go of our plans if we are to become the person we are meant to be.

Our time has changed, and it's changed and changed, and it continues to change so fast, that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. So the virtues of the past are the vices of today, and many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. And the moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now, and that's what it's not doing, and that's why it's ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion.

You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances.

Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.

People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.

From the standpoint of the Olympians, eon after eon of earthly history rolls by, revealing ever the harmonious form of the total round, so that where men see only change and death, the blessed behold immutable form, world without end. But now the problem is to maintain this cosmic standpoint in the face of an immediate earthly pain or joy.

We must be willing to get rid the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

an ameliorative mythology [that through] prayer or good deeds or some other activity, one can change the basic principles, the fundamental preconditions of life... This is like marrying someone in order to improve him or her—it is not a marriage.

The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is.

Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out. ~ Joseph Campbell

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn't continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

No return to the office! No return, anymore, to anything! Her life had cracked and smashed, at last; let it go, let it go.

In the West we know the military uniform, clerical collar, medical goatee, and judge's wig. But where people are naked, it is the body itself that must be changed.

first book of Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.

We can't have a mythology for a long, long time to come. Things are changing too fast to become mythologized.

My heart goes out to the playing and singing folk, the folk who are forever on the roads. Life is change; and to be seeing new wonders every day—the thrown sea, the silver rush of the meadow, the lights in distant towns—is to be living, and not merely existing. I pity the man who is content to stay always in the place where his mother dropped him; that is, unless his thoughts wander. For one might sit on a midden and dream stars!

Be a surfer. Watch the ocean. Figure out where the big waves are breaking and adjust accordingly.

Sooner or later we must realize there is no station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip. The station is only a dream. It constantly outdistances us.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,Through him the gale of life blew high;The tree of man was never quiet:Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

June suns, you cannot store them To warm the winter's cold...