38 Awesome Quotes on Change

1. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin
2. “Change before you have to.” – Jack Welch
3. “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed!” – Peter Senge
4. “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy
5. “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” – Albert Einstein
6. “Nothing endures but change.” – Heraclitus
7. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller
8. “Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.” – Margaret Mead
9. “I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.” – George Carlin
10. “The key to change… is to let go of fear.” – Rosanne Cash
11. “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
12. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
13. “Things do not change; we change.” – Henry David Thoreau
14. “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
15. “We change whether we like it or not.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
16. “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” – Benjamin Franklin
17. “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
18. “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” – Victor Frankl
19. “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
20. “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” – Woodrow Wilson
21. “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
22. “Our only security is our ability to change.” – John Lilly
23. “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.” – Maya Angelou
24. “Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
25. “The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” – Alan Watts
26. “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.” – Charles Kettering
27. “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
28. “People change and forget to tell each other.” – Lillian Hellman
29. “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
30. “Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.” – Peter Drucker
31. “In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.” – J. Paul Getty
32. “Change your thoughts and you change your world.” – Norman Vincent Peale
33. “Know what’s weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon…everything’s different.” – Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
34. “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
35. “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
36. “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” – Lao Tzu
37. “The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.” – Barbara Kingsolver
38. “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.