Change and Transformation

Don't force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different from your own.

Books are immortal sons defying their sires.

All is flux, nothing stays still.

Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, overtime, gain in political significance.

Tell them that the sacrifice was not in vain. Tell them that by way of the shop, the field, the skilled hand, habits of thrift and economy, by way of industrial school and college, we are coming. We are crawling up, working up, yea, bursting up. Often through oppression, unjust discrimination, and prejudice, but through them, we are coming up. And with proper habits, intelligence, and property, there is no power on earth that can permanently stay our progress.

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.

Is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence?

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

When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it.

I mean the attempt to prolong family connection unduly, and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.

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.

It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older one climbs with surprising strides.

A man’s life is interesting primarily when he has failed—I well know. For it’s a sign that he tried to surpass himself.

With Pleasure own your Errors past, And make each day a Critic on the last.

What molting time is to birds, so adversity or misfortune is . . . for us humans.

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

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!

There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.