Change Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

While the river of life glides along smoothly, it remains the same river; only the landscape on either bank seems to change.

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.

In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

John Henry Newman

Seasonal changes, as it were, take place in history, when there is practically an almost universal death, a falling of the foliage of the tree of life. Such were the intervals between the ancient and mediaeval time, the mediaeval and the modern.

George Edward Woodberry

Man can certainly keep on lying (and he does so); but he cannot make truth falsehood. He can certainly rebel (he does so); but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God. He can certainly flee from God (he does so) ; but he cannot escape Him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God (he does and is so) ; but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in His hate. He can certainly give himself to isolation (he does so — he thinks, wills and behaves godlessly, and is godless) ; but even in his isolation he must demonstrate that which he wishes to controvert — the impossibility of playing the "individual" over against God. He may let go of God, but God does not let go of him.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

This is why the ultimate reason of things must lie in a necessary substance, in which the differentiation of the changes only exists eminently as in their source; and this is what we call God.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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

The proud do not change to improve, but defend their position by rationalizing. Repentance means change, and it takes a humble person to change.

Ezra Taft Benson

In a world where change is inevitable and continuous, the need to achieve that change without violence is essential for survival.

I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

My diminished girth, in tailor phraseology, was hardly conceivable even by my own friends, or my respected medical adviser, until I put on my former clothing, over what I now wear, which is a thoroughly convincing proof of the remarkable change.

William Banting

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands.

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.

People change and forget to tell each other. Too bad –causes so many mistakes.

Lillian Hellman

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert F. Kennedy

The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception

Alfred Russel Wallace

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

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

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

Ivy Compton-Burnett

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

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

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

Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.