Change Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Winston Churchill

Simone de Beauvoir

Karl Marx

Colette

Marcel Proust

Leo Tolstoy

Isaac Newton

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.

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.

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.

But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

John F. Kennedy

You do not notice changes in what is always before you.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

Winston Churchill

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

Henry David Thoreau

Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

Quoted by Beauvoir as the watchword of the new feminism

Simone de Beauvoir

They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

Ought I to say that the form of change is fixity, or more precisely, that change is an endless search for fixity? A nostalgia for inertia: indolence and its frozen paradises. Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary. It is transition. But the moment I say transition, the spell is broken. Transition is not wisdom, but a simple going toward… Transition vanishes: only thus is it transition.

The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

Alfred North Whitehead

To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.

There are two kinds of fools: those who can't change their opinions and those who won't.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Reinhold Niebuhr

A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

When we are no longer able to change a situation we are challenged to change ourselves.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.

The scene changes but the aspirations of men of good will persist.

The world's a scene of changes, and to be
Constant, in Nature were inconstancy.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend towards more freedom and democracy, but that could change.