Quotes About Change

Las instituciones tienden a intentar preservar el problema para el cual son la solución. CLAY SHIRKY

A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts." Ramana Maharshi

Try to see the past as a room separate from the one you live in now. You can go in there, but you don't live there anymore.

In the span of one hundred and forty seconds I have transformed once again. I spill out of the seat, and to the back of the white beast, the crisp night air filling my lungs…There is plenty of life out here. Hands shoved into my coat pockets, the laughter of a circus clown echoing in the alleyways between tiny houses, the brick apartment buildings, the long warehouses that extend away from me. And already I can feel my hands on his neck.

Oliver Cromwell's words in dismissal of the Long Parliament: 'You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.

History is far more important than evolutionary theorizing as a reminder about human potential, because the historical evidence of change is so much more vivid.

We know that over time society sometimes improves in quality, and sometimes decays. What we cannot know is which direction our descendants will take.

We should accept the likelihood that male violence and male dominance over women have long been a part of our history. But with an evolutionary perspective we can firmly reject the pessimists who say it has to stay that way. Male demonism is not inevitable.

This is how you change the world, the smallest circles first… That humble energy, the kind that says, 'I will do what I can do right now in my own small way,' creates a ripple effect on the world.

It seems to me sometimes that seasons leave us in the way people do, never just gone, but degree by degree, fading like the smell on a loved one's favourite sweater, until the vanishing one day evolves into memory.

choice is our superhuman power. It allows us to change everything all at once,

To be depleted in the pursuit of a grander something is never truly exhausting. Certainly the tiredness is real and daunting but the lingering effects of perhaps helping to change and alter lives for the better and the majestic transcend all that. Today I am depleted. But I am also filled with energy and purpose.

The change that comes our way will come in many forms. In sights that are mysterious to our eyes, in sounds that are grating on our ears, in ways of thinking that will crash like thunder in our hearts and minds. But we must learn to ride each one of these horses of change. It is what the future asks of us and our survival depends on it.

I had some once. They didn't pan out. I don't have them anymore.

The change that comes our way will come in many forms. In sights that are mysterious to our eyes, in sounds that are grating on our ears, in ways of thinking that will crash like thunder in our hearts and minds. But we must learn to ride each one of these horses of change. It is what the future asks of us and our survival depends on it. That is the spirit teaching of the Horse.

I felt as though nothing had changed. I felt as though the only thing I had done was quit drinking. Only the land offered me any kind of solace.

Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge.

History is the enemy of memory.

In 1870 in response to the Fifteenth Amendment, the citizens of Michigan made a simple but far-reaching alteration to their 1850 constitution. They struck out the word "white.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changedBy a chameleon's tuning his skin to it.

The werewolf's painful change. Turning his head awayOn the sweaty bolster, he tries to rememberThe mood of manhood,But lies at last, as always,Letting it happen, the fierce fur soft to his face,Hearing with sharper ears.

But I am weary of The winter way of loving things for reasons. — Richard Wilbur, from "Winter Spring," New and Collected Poems (HBJ, 1988)

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom

It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.