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1 " When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary. "
― Walter M. Miller Jr. , A Canticle for Leibowitz (St. Leibowitz, #1)
2 " From too much love of livingFrom hope and fear set free,We thank with brief thanksgivingWhatever gods may beThat no life lives for ever;That dead men rise up never;That even the weariest riverWinds somewhere safe to sea.Then star nor sun shall waken,Nor any change of light:Nor sound of waters shaken,Nor any sound or sight:Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,Nor days nor things diurnal;Only the sleep eternalIn an eternal night. "
― Algernon Charles Swinburne , The Garden of Proserpine
3 " But confining myself more to the particular, I say that a prince may be seen happy to-day and ruined to-morrow without having shown any change of disposition or character. This, I believe, arises firstly from causes that have already been discussed at length, namely, that the prince who relies entirely upon fortune is lost when it changes. I believe also that he will be successful who directs his actions according to the spirit of the times, and that he whose actions do not accord with the times will not be successful. Because men are seen, in affairs that lead to the end which every man has before him, namely, glory and riches, to get there by various methods; one with caution, another with haste; one by force, another by skill; one by patience, another by its opposite; and each one succeeds in reaching the goal by a different method. One can also see of two cautious men the one attain his end, the other fail; and similarly, two men by different observances are equally successful, the one being cautious, the other impetuous; all this arises from nothing else than whether or not they conform in their methods to the spirit of the times. This follows from what I have said, that two men working differently bring about the same effect, and of two working similarly, one attains his object and the other does not. "
― Niccolò Machiavelli , The Prince
4 " Life is indeed perfect in itself. You see, the best religions in the world have members so afraid to lose them, that they themselves will fear any change and, in doing so, stop such religion from progressing and, in such attitude, lead it to an inevitable destruction. The art of detachment can be ignored for as long as one can attach, but the level at which one attaches to things will bring forth an equally leveled suffering, and so, the higher the emotional attachment, the higher the amount of pain one feels at the end. The atheists, on the other hand, are ironically the most commonly individuals possessed by spirits, and often, due to their lower vibrations, demons. Their lack of spirituality is both a disease and a justification for such mental disease. Whatever they say serves them well, but makes them suffer at the same time. And evil, evil can only be ignored insofar as people have options that allow ignoring it. As soon as those options vanish or are all under the control of evil, revolutions become inevitable. And so, one can say that truth doesn’t need faith to exist but is surely more easily recognized under the right beliefs, and as much as spirituality doesn’t need religion, but is more easily found inside one. "
― Robin Sacredfire
5 " One simple answer is that there has been a massive rise in the incidence of sanctimony and smugness among the successful that has nothing to do with any change in the underlying reality. Rather, it has been stimulated by politicians who have realized that it is possible to win power by recruiting the most economically successful forty per cent or so of the population in a crusade to roll back the gains made by their fellow citizens in the previous forty years. And how better to rationalize this than to tell people that they deserve the incomes that the market generates? "
― Brian M. Barry ,
6 " Tears had poured from her eyes without any change in her facial expression. It’s pure pain and pure surrender when your soul cries without any fight from your body and that’s how I knew she was deeply affected. "
― Renee Carlino , Sweet Thing (Sweet Thing, #1)
7 " The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot.Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much. "
― Michael Pollan , Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
8 " Trust me. If you do not decide where you are heading, and refuse to take the appropriate action, you will end up being shaped into what others would have you become. Then any change will not be made for your benefit but for theirs. "
― Chris Murray , The Extremely Successful Salesman's Club
9 " There is certainly no hope left of getting away. And it isn't even terrible; it's possibly funny, if even that. It's embarrassing. That's all. A little embarrassing to realize that I no longer control my life, that the major decisions have already been made, long before I was conscious that any change was occurring. "
― Philip K. Dick , Confessions of a Crap Artist
10 " If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms. "
― Richard Rohr , Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
11 " No one will improve his health significantly without accurately perceiving priorities, knowing clearly what is at stake if those are not attended to and what is to be gained if acted on correctly. That’s the basic homework before any change can come about. Then that knowledge has to be transformed into a sustainable motivation. "
― Darrell Calkins , Re:
12 " Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend. A game in which, he says, “...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity." "
13 " If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government, "
― Peter Singer , Writings on an Ethical Life
14 " We live in a complicated society, Bromley—one that is changing and which does indeed need to change. But do you not think any change must begin within our own family gathering? "
― P.J. Parker , America Túwaqachi: The Saga of an American Family
15 " Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow." It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. That's the peasant thinking for you. "
16 " Stale beer sticks to wobbling tables. The cigarette machine flashes in the corner, mocking smokers who never have any change on them. There’s no natural light in this pub, so it’s dark and gloomy. The pain on the face of the staff tells its own story: overworked, underpaid, exploited and treated as expendable. I feel at home with them. They’re so scared they will be fired from their terrible jobs, every time I order a beer they ask me if I want any peanuts or crisps, in case between drinks I’ve turned into the dreaded mystery shopper. The air is chewy and weighs heavy on the skin. The fruit machines in the corners don’t make a sound, aware this is the last stop saloon for the drunk few who can’t afford to gamble properly. Everyone here is down to their last pint and pound. "
― Craig Stone , Life Knocks
17 " Before any change for the better can take place, a level of understanding is always needed; because without understanding we tend to fall back on the automatic responses and reactions that we have built up over our lives. "
― , The Restful Mind
18 " It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones…Thus evolution by addition and the functional preservation of the preexisting structure must occur for one of two reasons-either the old function is required as well as the new one, or there is no way of bypassing the old system that is consistent with survival. "
― Carl Sagan , Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
19 " If the Earth were not subject to any change I would consider the Earth a big but useless body in universe, paralyzed...superfluous and unnatural.Those who so exalt incorruptibility, unchangeability and the like, are, I think, reduced to saying such things both because of inordinate desire they have to live for a long time and because of the terror they have of death...they do not realize that if men were immortal, they would have never come into the world. "
― Galileo Galilei
20 " Remember, for there to be any change in your life circumstances, you must change. You must improve yourself. You must develop your mind. You must change your company. If you want to fly like the eagles, then you have to make friends with the Eagles and not with chickens. You can’t be in the company of chickens and hope to fly like the Eagles someday. Life does not work that way. "