Change Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave neither room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.

Augusto Roa Bastos

Styles, like everything else, change. Style doesn't.

Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

Roughly, for me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity.

A woman's mind is cleaner than a man's; she changes it more often.

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful and diverse spur to innovation of any in modern times. Yet a set of ideas about a central aspect of this prosperity — "property" — confuses us. This confusion is leading us to change the environment in ways that will change the prosperity. Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.

Lawrence Lessig

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

In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?

Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

Christopher McCandless

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.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope — a slight change, and all patterns and configurations alter.

Sharon Salzberg

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.
Disarmament cannot be achieved nor can the problem of war be resolved without being accompanied by profound changes in the economic order and the structure of society.

Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

Marcus Aurelius

Change is the end result of all true learning. Change involves three things: First, a dissatisfaction with self - a felt void or need; second, a decision to change to fill the void or need; and third, a conscious dedication to the process of growth and change - the willful act of making the change, doing something.

The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades.

My illusion is to have something to transmit. If I can't change the world, at least I want to change the way people look at it.

Without struggle, no progress and no result. Every breaking of habit produces a change in the machine.

G. I. Gurdjieff