Quotes about Change

Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be — if we are to experience long survival — a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.

The poet Yeats felt we were living in the last of a great Christian cycle. His poem "The Second Coming" says, "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

From the standpoint of the Olympians, eon after eon of earthly history rolls by, revealing ever the harmonious form of the total round, so that where men see only change and death, the blessed behold immutable form, world without end. But now the problem is to maintain this cosmic standpoint in the face of an immediate earthly pain or joy.

In the West we know the military uniform, clerical collar, medical goatee, and judge's wig. But where people are naked, it is the body itself that must be changed.

first book of Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Plain horse sense ought to tell us that anything that makes no change in the man who professes it makes no difference to God, either.

By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, "There is no hurry. We shall get there some day." But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.

Goodbye..? Why can't we go back to page one and do it all over again?

And Teddy worried lots about The fact that he was rather stout. He thought: "If only I were thin! But how does anyone begin?

How does one become butterfly?' Pooh asked pensively. 'You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar,' Piglet replied. 'You mean to die?' asked Pooh. 'Yes and now,' he answered. 'What looks like you will die, but what's really you will live on.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.