Change and Transformation

There is nothing stable in the world—uproar’s your only music.

As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.

When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.

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

… Mutato nomine de te

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

You can’t step twice into the same river.

Everything flows and nothing stays.

I never dared be radical when young

Most of the change we think we see in life

There are no second acts in American lives.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

What we call the beginning is often the end

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

The times they are a-changin’.

Ah, but I was so much older then,

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.

Change is inevitable in a progressive country. Change is constant.

A sadder and a wiser man,

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!