 
|
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world
Are the ones who do.
-Anon., Apple Computer ad
|
|
|
|
"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."
-Maya Angelou
|
|
|
|
"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts."
-Arnold Bennett, "The Arnold Bennett Calendar"
|
|
|
|
“We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground.
Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.”
-Pema Chödrön, In the Gap Between Right and Wrong
|
|
|
|
"Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change."
-Confucius
|
|
|
|
People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.
-Stephen Covey
|
|
|
|
I was neurotic for years. I was anxious and depressed and selfish. Everyone kept telling me to change. I resented them and I agreed with them, and I wanted to change, but simply couldn't, no matter how hard I tried. Then one day someone said to me, "Don't change. I love you just as you are." Those words were music to my ears: "Don't change, Don't change. Don't change . . . I love you as you are." I relaxed. I came alive. And suddenly I changed!
-Anthony de Mello
|
|
|
|
I thought I could change the world. It took me a hundred years to figure out I can't change the world. I can only change Bessie. And honey, that ain't easy either.
-Annie Elizabeth Delany
|
|
|
|
"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."
-W. Edwards Deming
|
|
|
|
Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
-Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
|
|
|
|
Night has come! Leaning from the window, we gaze at the vast sombre stretch of the city below us, pierced with multitudinous points of light. Jeanne presses her hand to her forehead as she leans upon the window-bar, and seems a little sad. And I say to myself as I watch her: All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves: we must die in one life before we can enter into another!
And as if answering my thought, the young girl murmurs to me.
"My guardian, I am so happy; and still I feel as if I wanted to cry!"
http://www.archive.org/stream/crimeofsylvestre00franuoft/crimeofsylvestre00franuoft_djvu.txt
-Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
|
|
|
|
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
-Mahatma Gandhi
|
|
|
|
Change is healthy and useful. It has to be fought for most of the time. It's not inevitable. It takes real leadership and real effort. But I think it's really important not to take yourself too seriously. Dwight Eisenhower used to have a rule that you should always take your job seriously but not yourself.
-Newt Gingrich
|
|
|
|
I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.
-Ellen Goodman
|
|
|
|
Nothing endures but change.
-Heraclitus
|
|
|
|
Everything changes but change itself. Everything flows and nothing remains the same...You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go flowing ever on.
-Heraclitus
|
|
|
|
"Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken."
-Frank Herbert
|
|
|
|
The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are.... Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware...still clinging to things that no longer exist.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
|
|
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in traveling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.
-Washington Irving, "Tales of a Traveler"
|
|
|
|
The more things change, the more they are the same.
[Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose]
-Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes, January, 1849
|
|
|
|
"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."
-R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience
|
|
|
|
"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."
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
|
|
|
|
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
-Nelson Mandela, A Long Walk to Freedom
|
|
|
|
The issues are the same. We wanted peace on earth, love, and understanding between everyone around the world. We have learned that change comes slowly.
-Paul McCartney, 'Sayings of the Week', "The Observer", June 7, 1987
|
|
|
|
"None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting a few months or a few years to change all the tenor of our lives."
-Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living
|
|
|
|
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
-Barack Obama
|
|
|
|
"everything changes, nothing perishes"
[omnia mutantur, nihil interit]
-Ovid, Metamorphoses [15.165]
|
|
|
|
In Words, as Fashions, the same Rule will hold;
Alike Fantastick, if too New, or Old;
Be not the first by whom the New are try’d,
Nor yet the last to lay the Old aside.
-Alexander Pope, Essay On Criticism
|
|
|
|
The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort -- the opening, terror. Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing -- the opening a wonderfully joyous moment.
-Andy Rooney
|
|
|
|
"If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living."
-Gail Sheehy
|
|
|
|
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.
-Alvin Toffler
|
|
|
|
Change is the process by which the future invades our lives, and it is important to look at it closely, not merely from the grand perspectives of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing individuals who experience it.
-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock [Introduction]
|
|
|
|
As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.
-Eckhart Tolle
|
|
|
|
The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience ... not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
-Leo Tolstoy, letter [Tolstoy’s Letters, vol. 2 (1978)], February 23, 1903
|
|
|
|
Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.
-Harriet Tubman, [attributed, also found attributed to Mother Theresa, Denis Waitley, Truth Sojourner, and unattributed (indicating unknown, bumper sticker/magnet)]
|
|
|
|
"We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it."
-Mark Twain, Mark Twain at Your Fingertips
|
|
|
|
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
|
|
Books about Change
