Circle Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

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Change Quotes

It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear ... It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.

Marilyn Ferguson

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Victor Hugo

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

Arnold Bennett

Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.      

Richard Hooker (1554–1600), British theologian.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

Bono

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.           

Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), U.S. radical activist. “The Purpose,” Rules for Radicals (1971).

Change has considerable psychological impact on the human mind.

  To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse.

  To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better.

  To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.

Obviously, then, one’s character and frame of mind determine how readily he brings about change and how he reacts to change that is imposed on him.

King Whitney Jr, President, Personnel Laboratory Inc

I am personally convinced that one person can be a change catalyst, a transformer in any situation, any organization. Such an individual is yeast that can leaven an entire loaf. It requires vision, initiative, patience, respect, persistence, courage, and faith to be a transforming leader.

Stephen Covey

The power of a movement lies in the fact that it can indeed change the habits of people. This change is not the result of force but of dedication, of moral persuasion.          

Stephen Biko (1946–1977), South African political leader. Interview, July 1976.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.           

John Updike (b. 1932), U.S. author, critic. New Yorker (July 30, 1990).

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.

Alan Cohen

Perhaps we're too embarrassed to change or too frightened of the consequences of showing that we actually care. But why not risk it anyway?

Princess Diana

Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin.  

Denise McCluggage (b. 1927), U.S. race car driver. As quoted in WomenSports magazine, (June 1977).

Change is upsetting. Repetition is tedious. Three cheers for variation!        

Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist.

I resist change even as I call for it.          

Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist.

I’m not gonna change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people. 

John Lennon (1940–1980),

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure , the process is its own reward.

Amelia Earhart

The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.

Nathaniel Brandon

Sometimes when we are generous in small, barely detectable ways it can change someone else's life forever.

Margaret Cho

... disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.        

Kathleen Norris (b. 1947), U.S. poet and farmer. Dakota

There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.

Denis Diderot

I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.

Jimmy Dean

No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.

Barbara DeAngelis

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.

Maya Angelou

Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change - this is the rhythm of living. Out of our over-confidence, fear; out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope. And out of hope, progress.

Bruce Barton

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.

Marilyn Ferguson

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Personal change, growth, development, identity formation—these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events—a job, a mate, a child—through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.         

Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century), U.S. psychologist.

All things change, nothing is extinguished.... There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.   

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 B.C.–A.D. 17), Roman poet.

... religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.        

George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans] (1819–1880), British novelist. Middlemarch

The law of God is a law of change, and ... when the Churches set themselves against change as such, they are setting themselves against the law of God.         

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic.

I have to change how people view themselves in the world. I have to get people to believe they can in fact make a difference... We view ourselves ... as people trained to develop people. Issues are only tools.

Think about the guy who works in a factory. He’s on the assembly line. He’s a nobody. He doesn’t do the kind of work that’s ever gonna get him recognition.

Take that same person and he’s a key leader in the parish or in a union. Suddenly that same man, who from Monday to Friday stands on the assembly line at General Motors and is a nobody, is somebody over here.

People look to him. He makes a difference and he knows it. He counts.

Mary Gonzales, Mexican American neighborhood organizer. As quoted in The Great Divide, book 1, section 2, by Studs Terkel (1988). (The cofounder and associate director of a Chicago neighborhood organization, she was explaining what motivated her.)

What does not change is the will to change         

Charles Olson (1910–1970), U.S. poet.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. [Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.]      

Alphonse Karr (1808–1890), French journalist, novelist. Les Guêpes (Paris, Jan. 31, 1849).

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.         

Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 8 (1986).

(From the Clark Lecture which she delivered at Scripps College in Claremont, California, on February 15, 1983.)

let your acceptance change us, so that we may be moved

in living situations to do the truth in love;

to practise your acceptance until we know by heart

the table of forgiveness and laughter’s healing art.

Fred Kaan (20th century), congregational minister and hymn-writer. Published in Songs for a Gospel People (1987). “Help us accept each other,” l. 9-12, Hope Publishing Co. (1974).

 Things do not change; we change.          

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.

All things change, nothing is extinguished.... There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.   

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 B.C.–A.D. 17), Roman poet.

... religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.        

George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans] (1819–1880), British novelist. Middlemarch

The law of God is a law of change, and ... when the Churches set themselves against change as such, they are setting themselves against the law of God.         

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic.

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

Max Lerner (b. 1902), U.S. author, columnist.