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Quotes about change

166 quotes from 131 people

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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)
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt1906–1975The New Yorker (12 September 1970)
- Politics
The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured.
Hannah Arendt1906–1975Interview with French writer Roger Errera in New York Review of Books (1974)
The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
Matthew Arnold1822–1888God and the Bible (1875)
- Thinking
Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe love nothing so much as to change. The Universe is change.
Marcus Aurelius121–180
Acquire the contemplative way of seeing how all things change into one another.
Marcus Aurelius121–180Meditations, Book X, 11
- Thinking
Remember, that to change thy mind upon occasion, and to follow him that is able to rectify thee, is equally ingenuous, as to find out at the first, what is right and just, without help.
Marcus Aurelius121–180Meditations (c. 170–180), The Eighth BookIn context
- Wisdom
Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.
Sri Aurobindo1872–1950Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)
- Nature
It is the nature of human institutions to degenerate, to lose their vitality, and decay, and the first sign of decay is the loss of flexibility and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived.
Sri Aurobindo1872–1950India’s Rebirth, 22 September 1907
How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!
Jane Austen1775–1817Mansfield Park (1814), Chapter XXIIIn context
- Time
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
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
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
Russell Baker1925–2019“The Fact About Progress,” The New York Times (1970-02-24)
Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin1924–1987“As Much Truth As One Can Bear” in The New York Times Book Review (January 14, 1962); republished in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2011), edited by Randall Kenan
When you’re through changing, you’re through.
Bruce Fairchild Barton1886–1967