Change Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Winston Churchill

Simone de Beauvoir

Karl Marx

Colette

Marcel Proust

Leo Tolstoy

Andy Warhol

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.

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

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs 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. About 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Ivy Compton-Burnett

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

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.

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.

Frank Lloyd Wright

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.

Robert F. Kennedy

The inability of those in power to still the voices of their own consciences is the great force leading to change.

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.

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

Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

Ernest J. Gaines