Change and Transformation

The laws of circumstance are abolished by new circumstances.

If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral.

Darling, this is the trap: BELIEVE YOU ARE GOOD WHEN THEY TELL YOU YOU ARE GOOD AND YOU ARE THEREBY DEAD, DEAD, DEAD. Dead forever. Art is a day by day game of living and dying and if you live a little more than you die you are going to continue to create some pretty fair stuff, but if you die a little more than you live, you know the answer .

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

A note: despair at the badness of the book; can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord know the truth.

Man is not constituted to take pleasure in the same things always.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

Change alone is unchanging.

You could not step twice into the same rivers. For other waters are ever flowing on to you.

There is nothing permanent except change.

There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Change in all things is sweet.

From a small seed a mighty trunk may grow.

Quitting smoking is easy, I've done it hundreds of times.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes .

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency - and a virtue, and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency - and a vice.