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Quotes about change

166 quotes from 131 people

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The world is more malleable than you think and it’s waiting for you to hammer it into shape.
Bonoborn 1960PENN Address (2004)
- Inspiration
Nought may endure but Mutability.
Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822Mutability (1816), st. 4In context
Acquire the contemplative way of seeing how all things change into one another.
Marcus Aurelius121–180Meditations, Book X, 11
- Thinking
How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?
Michel de Montaigne1533–1592Essays, Book I, Ch. 27, It is folly to measure the true and false by our own capacity
- Faith
The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization.
Will Durant1885–1981Philosophy and the Social Problem (1917)
- History
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell1904–1987A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (1991), p. 18
- Life & Death
Men might be better if we better deemed
Of them. The worst way to improve the world
Is to condemn it.
Philip James Bailey1816–1902Festus (1839)
- Character
Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.
Audre Lorde1934–1992Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), “Learning from the 60s”
- Responsibility
Strictly speaking, relativism does not permit social progress, because the new culture is by definition no better than the one it replaced.
Dinesh D'Souzaborn 1961The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 6
- Philosophy
By the time we awaken faintly to the awareness that we have been socially conditioned, we find ourselves so indoctrinated that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to break the old patterns.
Frank Herbert1920–1986“Science Fiction and a World in Crisis” in Science Fiction: Today and Tomorrow (1974) edited by Reginald Bretnor
- Thinking
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
Doris Lessing1919–2013The Sunday Times (London, 10 May 1992)
- Age
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
George Eliot1819–1880Middlemarch (1871-72)In context
The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
Matthew Arnold1822–1888God and the Bible (1875)
- Thinking
People don’t change or improve much, but they do evolve. It is very slow.
Martin Amis1949–2023“Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin” (1997)
I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.
Henrik Ibsen1828–1906Letter to Georg Brandes (3 January 1882).