Quotes about Change

Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places.

All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.

Break the monotony. Do something strange and extravagant!

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

The surest poison is time.

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease.

What we fear of doing most is usually what we most need to do.

Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.

Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age

We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, ? is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.