Quotes About Change (page 36)
Children of the Law,’ I said, ‘he is not dead.’ M’ling turned his sharp eyes on me. ‘He has changed his shape - he has changed his body,’ I went on. ‘For a time you will not see him. He is.. there’ - I pointed upward - ‘where he can watch you. You cannot see him. But he can see you. Fear the Law.
H. G. Wells
At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
C. S. Lewis
All things that we ordained festival,Turn from their office to black funeral;Our instruments to melancholy bells,Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast,Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change,Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,And all things change them to the contrary.
William Shakespeare
Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends--the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also! Truly the universe is full of...
H. Rider Haggard
You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.
Michael Ondaatje
...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
Doug Coupland