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Quotes about change

166 quotes from 131 people

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“New friends, however, will not be the same.” No, nor will you yourself remain the same; you change with every day and every hour.
Seneca the Younger5 BC–AD 65Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CIV: On Care of Health and Peace of Mind
- Friendship
Friends of my youth, a last adieu! haply some day we meet again;
Yet ne’er the self-same men shall meet; the years shall make us other men.
Richard Francis Burton1821–1890The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
- Friendship
The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
Alan Watts1915–1973The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), p. 32
- Happiness
Only a crisis⁠—actual or perceived⁠—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
Milton Friedman1912–2006Capitalism and Freedom (1962), preface to the 1982 edition, p. ix
- Ideas
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bachborn 1936Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
- Wisdom
Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.
W. Somerset Maugham1874–1965The Razor’s Edge (1943)
- Happiness
We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. […] And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself?
Greta Thunbergborn 2003“You are stealing our future” (December 2018)
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
John Updike1932–2009The New Yorker (30 July 1990)
- Art
It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once.
Thomas Paine1737–1809First Principles of Government (1795)
- Truth & Lies
The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit.
Bhagat Singh1907–1931Letter to the editor of The Modern Review, published in The Tribune (25 December 1929)
Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Mark Carneyborn 1965Speech at WEF, Davos (January 20, 2026)
We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.
Mark Carneyborn 1965Speech at WEF, Davos (January 20, 2026)
We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society.
Martin Luther King Jr.1929–1968Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
John F. Kennedy1917–1963Address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche, Frankfurt (25 June 1963)
- Time
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
Jack Kerouac1922–1969On the Road (1957), Part Two, Ch. 8
- Life & Death