Change Quotes

Every action in this world, every word, every thought, has an effect. But the actor is also acted upon by his action. The condition on which you are allowed to make a change in the world is that the world changes you as well.

~ Yael Shahar

Self awareness is the key, and the first step in change. We cannot change our world or ourselves without the awareness of what needs to change. To shift the patterns that disempower you, you must get honest with yourself and become aware of what they are.

~ Eileen Anglin

Life's been one tough little shit, but there's a very obvious reason why she hasn't let me get too comfy, settle too long or sink too deep. She knows she has to kick me in the ass sometimes to get me moving on my journey.

~ Jennifer Delucy

...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

~ Robert Penn Warren

CHANGE: Don’t just talk about it, go out there and do it. Don’t just meditate about it, go out there and create it. Don’t just pray about it go out there and take action; participate in the answering of your own prayer. If you want change, get out there and live it. - Steve Maraboli

~ Steve Maraboli

If the people of God were to transform the world through fascination, these amazing teachings had to work at the center of these peculiar people. Then we can look into the eyes of a centurion and see not a beast but a child of God, and then walk with that child a couple of miles. Look into the eys of tax collectors as they sue you in court; see their poverty and give them your coat. Look in to the eys of the ones who are hardest for you to like, and see the One you love. For God loves good and bad people.

~ Shane Claiborne

Real change requires you to change your behavior-not just your attitude.

~ Phil Stutz

Today I prayed for Boston, for America, my home away from home. Today, I realized how lucky we Sri Lankans are to have peace in our country. How I feel today, hearing of the bombs going off in the city brings back memories of how I used to feel four years ago in Sri Lanka when the LTTE was setting off bombs all around Colombo. That feeling I used to get when I hear about a bomb blast, the goosebumps, the school evacuation drills, the breaking news footage, and most of all, that fear we Sri Lankans used to feel, every second of everyday, it all came back to me today. Thank you God for bringing peace to my country, look after America the way you did Sri Lanka.

~ Thisuri Wanniarachchi

Idle to pretend that we have lost paradise. We never had it, it is still to make.

~ Susan Ertz

But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character --- the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides.

~ Michael Ondaatje

There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything's already turning into something else!

~ David Mitchell

Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time. . . . a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . .

~ T.s. Eliot

Well, sometimes things don't change on their own. Sometimes we have to change them.

~ Suzanne Lafleur

Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world.

~ Nick Harkaway

How can I explain to her that I just can't come home? It's too soon, it's too late; I do want to be with Helen every second of the day but at the same time I don't want to be with her at all. I want to have back what I felt at the beginning. I could no more leave her then than leave my arms or legs. How do you find the beginning, though? There are no roads or signs. You start to doubt it even exists. The hardest thing isn't deciding that I want to go back to when Helen and Gracie and I were us. The most difficult thing is finding the map to get there.

~ Cath Crowley

If we are ever going to achieve a rational approach to organizing our affairs, we have to dignify the process of admitting to being wrong. It doesn't help matters at all if the media, or your friends, accuse you of flip-flopping when you change your mind. Changing our minds is our hope for the future.

~ Brian Eno

From the Buddhist perspective, the only lasting way to bring about change is for people themselves to change.

~ Pat Allwright

We must throw out the old, fear-based thought-forms and evolve, and begin to live as higher beings of compassion.

~ Bryant Mcgill

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

He smiled at me, and just like that I was completely happy to be who I was. I knew it wouldn't be easy all the time, but right now it was as simple as sunshine because Nathan was here and had helped me to realize that I was still Ramsey, no matter how much things had changed.

~ Markelle Grabo

Today's Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after midcentury when the communications revolution lead to expectations of instantanaiy are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the thunderclap of cause will be swiftly followed by the lightening bolt of effect.

~ William Manchester

Besides, Mrs. Quesnt, did it never occur to you that we are not changing at all-that rather, we are simply becoming more ourselves?

~ Galen Beckett

When we were on trees, others had lived in skies. When we reach skies, descendant of primitives will someday convey this message.

~ Toba Beta

Deep and sustainable change...requires changes in behavior among those who do not welcome the change.

~ Douglas B. Reeves

Sometimes there is no choice but to walk into your own house. Far away, you think, and you do not want to see. You come home and you say do not tell me. You say, I have hunted the elk all over the snowfields of the Selway, and I do not want to know what happened here. And then there is a morning you walk in and take a look in your own house, like any traveler.

~ William Kittredge

Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.

~ Grant Morrison

All change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out the changes that understanding creates in your heart.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.

~ Seth Godin

Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.

~ Haruki Murakami

To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.

~ Barbara Hurd

Sudden shifts and changes are no bad preparation for political life.

~ Charles Dickens

Even if there were only two men left in the world and both of them saints they wouldn't be happy. One them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things.

~ Frank O'connor

The fact that my circumstances had changed drastically but my behavior hadn't was beginning to wear on me.

~ Anthony Kiedis

When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.

~ Tennessee Williams

I can't change what's happened to me in my life, or make what's not occurred take place. But I can't say I like it, or accept it, or believe it's for the best. I don't and never shall, not even if I'm damned for it.

~ Margaret Laurence

You know that smell, when you put your nose up to a pine tree? I told her I did perfectly. No matter how long it has been, you always will. Like you are storing a part of that tree in your own body. ... Everything stays true. You are yourself, no matter how much you have to change.

~ Ramona Ausubel

It's so damn hard to bloom... to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it's hard. Desire to change isn't enough. Or desperation. Couldn't be done without...love

~ Dean Koontz

It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

~ Kim Edwards

The change most needed in our lives isn't change in our situations and relationships but in us. The thing God is most intent on rescuing us from is ourselves.

~ Timothy D. Lane

[W]e are not merely tempered and schooled by failure but compelled, in however subtle a fashion, to become something other than we were.

~ Anthony Lane