Quotation.Cloud - A repository of notable quotations from across time and space

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

 - Mahatma Gandhi

Everyone thinks about changing the world, but no one thinks about changing himself.

 - Leo Tolstoy

Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.

 - Marcus Aurelius

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.

 - Jim Rohn

How lavish is Nature, building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.

 - John Muir

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.

 - Gilda Radner

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves. It is like a nation which we have provoked, but meet again after two generations. They are still Frenchmen, but not the same.

 - Blaise Pascal

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damn-fool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? -- The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

 - Salman Rushdie

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

 - Edmund Burke

But the whole vital process of the Earth takes place so gradually and in periods of time which are so immense compared with the length of our life, that these changes are not observed, and before their course can be recorded from beginning to end whole nations perish and are destroyed.

 - Aristotle

Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.

 - Isaac Asimov

Here's to the crazy ones -- the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently - they are not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can ‘t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

 - Steve Jobs

He possesses dominion over himself and is happy, who can every day say, “I have lived.” To-morrow the Heavenly Father may either involve the world in dark clouds or cheer it with clear sunshine; he will not, however, render ineffectual the things which have already taken place.

 - Horace

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will conceal and cover up what is now shining with the greatest splendor.

 - Horace

If you don't like who you are and where you are, don't worry about it because you are not stuck either with who you are or where you are. You can grow. You can change. You can he more than you are.

 - Zig Ziglar

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be unlocked from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.

 - Marilyn Ferguson

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 into another!

 - Anatole France

Character is not cut in marble -- it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

 - George Eliot

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

 - Steve Jobs

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

 - Buckminster Fuller

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

 - Aldous Huxley

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I've looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

 - Steve Jobs

In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

 - Edith Wharton