Change Quotes

“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“She had just realized there were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. For at that moment, all our fears suddenly surface: the fear of setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full of new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything that is familiar.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym

“Change is hardest at the beginning, messiest in the middle and best at the end.”
― Robin Sharma, The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life

“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“Change almost never fails because it's too early. It almost always fails because it's too late.”
― Seth Godin

“What people have the capacity to choose, they have the ability to change.”
― Madeleine Albright

“Are you a student of Shakespeare?"
"He's been dead a long time, so not precisely, but who isn't?" she said.”
― Lisa Kaniut Cobb, Down in the Valley

“There must be a few times in life when you stand at a precipice of a decision. When you know there will forever be a Before and an After...I knew there would be no turning back if I designated this moment as my own Prime Meridian from which everything else would be measured.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“Ano snorted in a very unladylike and elkish way.”
― Lisa Kaniut Cobb, Down in the Valley

“We hunt as we've always done, part sport, part grocery shopping.”
― Lisa Kaniut Cobb, Down in the Valley

“Tomorrow you promise yourself will be different, yet tomorrow is too often a repetition of today.”
― James T. Mccay

“Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others. ”
― Jacob M. Braude

“I had always had a little problem looking out for myself in love. I was afraid people would leave me. So I sort of clung and did everything possible to keep someone around. I didn't have a hard talk with myself about who I was keeping around. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. I clung to people like human life preservers. I thought i'd die if someone left me. Its ironic because now I'm the one who's leaving.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing

“All your life you're yellow. Then one day you brush up against something blue, the barest touch, and voila, the rest of your life you're green.”
― Tess Callahan

“We are constantly trying to hold it all together. If you really want to see why you do things, then don't do them and see what happens.”
― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“I am a fashion person, and fashion is not only about clothes -- it's about all kinds of change”
― Karl Lagerfeld

“The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“But sleep didn't come. She could hear Jace's soft piano playing through the walls, but that wasn't what was keeping her awake. She was thinking of Simon, leaving for a house that no longer felt like home to him, of the despair in Jace's voice as he said 'I want to hate you', and of Magnus, not telling Jace the truth: that Alec did not want Jace to know about his relationship because he was still in love with him. She thought of the satisfaction it would have brought Magnus to say the words out loud, to acknowledge what the truth was, and the fact that he hadn't said them - had let Alec go on lying and pretending - because that was what Alec wanted, and Magnus cared about Alec enough to give him that. Maybe it was true what the Seelie Queen had said, after all: Love made you a liar.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

“I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.”
― Barack Obama

“She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“The finished clock is resplendent. At first glance it is simply a clock, a rather large black clock with a white face and a silver pendulum. Well crafted, obviously, with intricately carved woodwork edges and a perfectly painted face, but just a clock.
But that is before it is wound. Before it begins to tick, the pendulum swinging steadily and evenly. Then, then it becomes something else.
The changes are slow. First, the color changes in the face, shifts from white to grey, and then there are clouds that float across it, disappearing when they reach the opposite side.
Meanwhile, bits of the body of the clock expand and contract, like pieces of a puzzle. As though the clock is falling apart, slowly and gracefully.
All of this takes hours.
The face of the clock becomes a darker grey, and then black, with twinkling stars where numbers had been previously. The body of the clock, which has been methodically turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle shades of white and grey. And it is not just pieces, it is figures and objects, perfectly carved flowers and planets and tiny books with actual paper pages that turn. There is a silver dragon that curls around part of the now visible clockwork, a tiny princess in a carved tower who paces in distress, awaiting an absent prince. Teapots that pour into teacups and minuscule curls of steam that rise from them as the seconds tick. Wrapped presents open. Small cats chase small dogs. An entire game of chess is played.
At the center, where a cuckoo bird would live in a more traditional timepiece, is the juggler. Dress in harlequin style with a grey mask, he juggles shiny silver balls that correspond to each hour. As the clock chimes, another ball joins the rest until at midnight he juggles twelve balls in a complex pattern.
After midnight, the clock begins once more to fold in upon itself. The face lightens and the cloud returns. The number of juggled balls decreases until the juggler himself vanishes.
By noon it is a clock again, and no longer a dream.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Real change is difficult at the beginning, but gorgeous at the end. Change begins the moment you get the courage and step outside your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone.”
― Roy T. Bennett

“Never underestimate the power you have to take your life in a new direction.”
― Germany Kent

“Definitions and meanings change all the time. Truth and reality are very volatile, indefinite, multi layered and sometimes very paradoxical. That’s why it is very fiddly to make a set definition for the phenomena of our daily life. ( " Did not expect it would ever happen, there" )”
― Erik Pevernagie