Change Insights
Abraham Lincoln:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion
is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case
is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
Alfred North Whitehead:
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid
order.
Alice Walker:
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Alvin Toffler:
In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated
information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized
monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any
model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As
a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.
Anais Nin:
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than
the risk it took to blossom.
Andy Warhol:
They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them
yourself.
Anne Frank:
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to
improve the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer:
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
Charles Darwin:
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent,
but the one most responsive to change.
Charles DuBois:
The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are
for what we could become.
Charles Kettering:
If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.
Eleanor Roosevelt:
People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This
is how character is built.
Epictetus:
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
Eric Hoffer:
In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find
themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Felix Adler:
We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The
world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it.
G. K. Chesterton:
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave
them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a
torrent of change.
General Eric Shinseki:
If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. [Chief of
Staff, U. S. Army]
Georg C. Lichtenberg:
I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they
must change if they are to get better.
George Bernard Shaw:
Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never
were and say, "Why not?"
frequently attributed to Robert F. (Bobby) Kennedy, who used it in a speech
which his brother, Edward F. (Teddy) Kennedy quoted at RFK's funeral.
George Will:
The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
Gloria Steinem:
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
Harriet Lerner:
Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable
from social and political change.
Helen Keller:
The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
Henri Bergson:
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating
oneself endlessly.
Henry David Thoreau:
Things do not change, we change.
Henry Steele Commager:
Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires
change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants
and the ability to satisfy them.
Heraclitus:
All is flux; nothing stays still.
Irene Peter:
Just because everything is different doesn't mean that everything has changed.
Ivy Baker Priest:
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the
beginning.
James Baldwin:
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the
earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease
to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible
to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light
fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease
to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
James Yorke:
The most successful people are those who are good at plan B.
John Dewey:
The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ...
(and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now
this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where
intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate
provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of
wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a
democratic society.
John F. Kennedy:
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are
certain to miss the future.
Katharine Butler Hathaway:
A person needs at intervals to separate from family and companions and go to new
places. One must go without familiars in order to be open to influences, to
change.
Kenneth Kaunda:
The inability of those in power to still the voices of their own consciences is
the great force leading to change.
Leo Tolstoy:
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
M. Scott Peck:
The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one
solitary and even humble individual - for it is in the solitary mind and soul of
the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won
or lost.
M. Scott Peck:
The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are
feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such
moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts
and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
Marcus Aurelius:
The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it.
Margaret Mead:
Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the
world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Maria Mitchell:
We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the
more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable
of seeing.
Marian Wright Edelman:
You really can change the world if you care enough.
Marilyn Ferguson:
It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways,
but it's that place in between that we fear . . . . It's like being between
trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold
on to.
Mary Antin, 1912:
We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later;
and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own
inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the
pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our
spiritual growth.
Maxine Hong Kingston:
To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas
and values into the world -- that I am able to change it in positive ways.
Med Yones:
Degree of Change = Degree of education +
Degree of experience. [International Institute of Management]
Mitsugi Saotome:
If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which
to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your
purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning.
This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge,
the joy of growth.
Nancy Astor:
The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything or
nothing.
Nelson Mandela:
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Oliver Wendell Holmes:
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot
answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Ovid:
All things change; nothing perishes.
Pablo Picasso:
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do
it.
Paulo Freire:
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate
integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and
bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which
men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to
participate in the transformation of their world.
Pearl S. Buck:
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and
in the way they express their love.
Peter F. Drucker:
Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain
stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the
organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer.
Because its function is to put knowledge to work -- on tools, processes, and
products; on work; on knowledge itself -- it must be organized for constant
change.
Rachel Carson:
Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one
species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Life is a progress, and not a station.
Robert F. Kennedy:
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to
change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be
written the history of this generation.
Robert Frost:
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
Stephen Sigmund:
Learn wisdom from the ways of a seedling. A seedling which is never hardened off
through stressful situations will never become a strong productive plant.
Steven Foster:
You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it?
How can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies
in the return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return
to has changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You
will not incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The
river has been flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same
river. [The Book of the Vision Quest]
Thomas Jefferson:
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
Thomas a Kempis:
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you
cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
Tom Robbins:
The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that
is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c)
doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead
of creating the perfect love.
Tony Robbins:
If we habitually focus on how to improve things that are already great, can you
see how this spirit can transform ourselves, our organizations, families and
communities?
Tryon Edwards:
He that never changes his opinions, never corrects his mistakes, and will never
be wiser on the morrow than he is today.
Victor Frankl:
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and
struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of
tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled
by him.
Washington Irving:
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I
have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to
shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.
William Shakespeare:
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
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