Change and Transformation

Man is not truly one, but truly two.

Finality is death. Perfection is finality.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity … It is a part of nature.

Evolution … is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite coherent heterogeneity.

One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

Nought may endure but Mutability.

When the lamp is shattered

He has out-soared the shadow of our night.

From the contagion of the world’s slow stain

The younger generation is knocking at the door, and as I open it there steps spritely in the incomparable Max.

We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the book in the fire.

‘Change’ is scientific, ‘progress’ is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

The age demanded an image

For three years, out of key with his time,

Not to go back, is somewhat to advance,

Some praise at morning what they blame at night;

’Tis education forms the common mind,

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.