quotations about change
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.
WASHINGTON IRVING
Tales of a Traveller
The people who keep back change are often exasperating. But they have their work to perform, highly important work, too. Their very opposition, besides helping to weed out the weak ideas, gives the true ideas greater strength. For an idea is not worth much unless it can sturdily make its way through opposition and display toughness of fiber.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Change", Reactions and Other Essays
There is in all change something at once agreeable and infamous, something that smacks of infidelity and of moving day.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Oh! th' world's a mere kaleidoscope;
Its pictures, brittle bits of glass,
Coloured of fancy, love, and hope,
That quickly from our vision pass;
When we would fix what we admire,
The subtle atoms swift retire!
C. B. LANGSTON
"Change"
Time does not tarry ever ... but change and growth is not in all things and places alike.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring
Resistless change, when powerless to improve,
Can only mar.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Perfectness"
Every change is a menace to stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
On every thing are traced decay and change.
Look! how the shifting seasons slip away.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"Musings"
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
It is said that there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe -- that nothing remains in its original state, that each day, each hour, each moment, there is change.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
An important step, far-reaching in its consequences, was taken when man first sought the cause of change and decay in things themselves and in the laws which appeared to govern things, rather than in powers and forces outside of and beyond them. When the question was first asked, What is it that persists amid all changes and that underlies every change? a new era was about to dawn in the history of man's wonder and his desire to know.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, Mar. 4, 1908
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
JEAN DEBUFFET
attributed, You Can't Plant Tomatoes in Central Park
The nature o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world. And the urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.
BILL CLINTON
speech at the Urban League National Convention in San Diego, California, July 27, 1992
Is any man afraid of change? Why what can take place without change?
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
You gotta run, this world is standin' still
You gotta believe, you can make it up that hill
You gotta know, you can have anything
You gotta be the best that you can be
But don't change for me.
GIN BLOSSOMS
"Don't Change for Me"
All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
foreword, Tales from Earthsea
To change the name and not the letter,
Is a change for the worst, and not for the better.
ROBERT CHAMBERS
Book of Days
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.... This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Asimov on Science Fiction
The architecture of change involves the design and construction of new patterns, or the reconceptualization of old ones, to make new, and hopefully more productive, actions possible.
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER
The Change Masters