Change and Transformation

In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.

That which does not kill me makes me stronger.

Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy.

 

It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son’s age.

All children, except one, grow up.

 

[ Of a girl before marriage :] As an apple reddens on the high bough; high atop the highest bough the apple pickers passed it by—no, not passed it by, but they could not reach it.

Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.Those whom I deemedChanged to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,Have aged and lost our old affinity:One has to change to stay akin to me.

A childlike man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle aged habit and convention.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets, reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself.

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!

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they’re worn out and at times—and this is the worst of all—before we have new ones.

The times they are a-changin’.

my father moved through dooms of love through sames of am through haves of give, singing each morning out of each night my father moved through depths of height

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

 

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety-nine retreat: that is progress.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.

One cannot help using his early friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress.

Savagely is necessary ever}' four or five hundred years in order to bring the world back to life. Otherwise the world would die of civilization.