Quotes about change

School-rules, school-duties, school-habits and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies — such was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it was not enough; I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: "Then," I cried, half desperate, "grant me at least a new servitude!"Here a bell, ringing the hour of supper, called me downstairs.

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

Not every success needs to be abandoned drastically, but every success needs to be questioned drastically.

If the system settles into harmony and equilibrium it will eventually stagnate and die.

Change comes in various wavelengths. There are changes in the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed.

So often we need a whole lifetime in order to change our life, we think a great deal, weigh things up and vacillate, then we go back to the beginning, we think and think, we displace ourselves on the tracks of time with a circular movement, like those clouds of dust, dead leaves, debris, that have no strength for anything more, better by far that we should live in a land of hurricanes.

Order did not want to be born; chaos wasn’t ready to die.

“You make me wonder about my own country, Spartacus, not just yours.”

“Good,” the black man rumbled. “Wonderin’s good. Ain’t nothin’ gonna change till you wonder if it oughta.”

The Confederate States had been founded on the principle that change was a bad idea.

“It’s not the way it was any more,” he said, half to himself. “Nothing is the way it was anymore.”

The worst revolutionaries today are those reactionaries who do not see and will not admit that there is any need for change.

Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure.