38 Awesome Quotes on Change
May 2, 2011 / /
- “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin
- “Change before you have to.” – Jack Welch
- “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed!” – Peter Senge
- “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy
- “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” – Albert Einstein
- “Nothing endures but change.” – Heraclitus
- “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller
- “Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.” – Margaret Mead
- “I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.” – George Carlin
- “The key to change… is to let go of fear.” – Rosanne Cash
- “When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.” – Andy Warhol
- “Be the change you want to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “Things do not change; we change.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – St. Francis of Assisi
- “We change whether we like it or not.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” – Benjamin Franklin
- “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” – Anatole France
- “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” – Victor Frankl
- “Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.” – Shunryu Suzuki
- “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” – Woodrow Wilson
- “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” – John Kenneth Galbraith
- “Our only security is our ability to change.” – John Lilly
- “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.” – Maya Angelou
- “Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” – Alan Watts
- “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.” – Charles Kettering
- “We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.” – R.D. Laing
- “People change and forget to tell each other.” – Lillian Hellman
- “The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades.” – John Kotter
- “Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.” – Peter Drucker
- “In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.” – J. Paul Getty
- “Change your thoughts and you change your world.” – Norman Vincent Peale
- “Know what’s weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon…everything’s different.” – Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
- “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell
- “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.” – C. S. Lewis
- “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” – Lao Tzu
- “The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.” – Barbara Kingsolver
- “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” – Anonymous
Big thanks to Val Vadeboncouer for locating these quotes.
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Mitch Ditkoff is the Co-Founder and President of Idea Champions and the author of “Awake at the Wheel”, as well as the very popular Heart of Innovation blog.
Posted in culture, Management
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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 de Angelis
Mitch,
Nor sure if the picture is supposed to be my, or Seth’s head (probable his, more pointy!)PP
Great list! But the Serenity Prayer (#14) was written by Reinhold Niebuhr, not St. Francis (much as I love him). For those interested, here’s a brief history of the Serenity Prayer.
Eileen Flanagan, author of The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Change–and When to Let Go.
Thanks for that clarification, Eileen. For YEARS, I thought the Serenity Prayer was from St. Francis. Oops!
doing the first step toward a change is really frighten, but i guess we have to do it sometime to keep on going with life. “no pain, no gain”