Personal change, social change, change in our environment — change, as the quote goes, is the only constant in life. Yet managing change, choosing change, sticking with positive change — that can be difficult.
If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it You just do it one step at a time.
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.
To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
To listen is to lean in softly
With a willingness to be changed
By what we hear.
Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.
Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.
We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.
If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.
Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free transformation. I favor incremental change.
To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world — that I am able to change it in positive ways.
I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it.
If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.
Hope and change are hard-fought things.
A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.
If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world — that is the myth of the atomic age — as in being able to remake ourselves.
Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Capitalism has been interpreted as an exclusively profit-centric human engagement. Some have been saying to bring people and planet into the picture. This can be a good change, but it is still not fully operationalized. Are you putting people, planet and profit at the same level?
The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything or nothing.
She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view… The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.
Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.
If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to be different yourself.
If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself.
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimension.
The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving
All things change; nothing perishes.
Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives. And when that person moves away, someone else arises to take his or her place.
The people who help us grow toward true self offer unconditional love, neither judging us to be deficient nor trying to force us to change but accepting us exactly as we are. And yet this unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out — a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires.
There is no guarantee that starting a small conversation will lead to something larger. But the failure to take any step at all, no matter how small, comes with an ironclad guarantee that we will not be part of helping change happen.
Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness — mine, yours, ours — need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.
Our complicity in world making is a source of awesome and sometimes painful responsibility — and a source of profound hope for change. It is the ground of our common call to leadership, the truth that makes leaders of us all.
Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.
Stress is the physical and psychological effects we experience as a result of the way we react to changes in the surrounding environment.
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
I am comforted by life’s stability, by earth’s unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work — on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself — it must be organized for constant change.
People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.
The range of what we think and do
Is limited by what we fail to notice
And because we fail to notice
There is little we can do
To change
Until we notice
How failing to notice
Shapes our thoughts and deeds.
One of the most powerful, and deeply spiritual, ways to work for social change is for us to take action in the present that embodies — right now! — the future vision that we seek
Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.
The only journey is the one within.
