Quotes About Changing Lives

“Our lives are often a continuous betrayal and denial of what came before, we twist and distort everything as time passes, and yet we are still aware, however much we deceive ourselves, that we are the keepers of secrets and mysteries, however trivial. How tiring having always to move in the shadows or, even more difficult, in the half-light, which is never the same, always changing, every person has his light areas and his dark areas, they change according to what he knows and to what day it is and who he's talk to and what he wants ... Sometimes it is only the weariness brought on by the shadow that impels one to tell all the facts, the way someone hiding will suddenly reveal himself, either the pursuer or the pursued, simply in order to bring the game to an end and to step free from what has become a kind of enchantment.”

— Javier Marías

“THE "GOING HOME" SYNDROME As human beings, we gravitate toward the familiar. We like to sleep on the same side of the bed each night, to park in the same space at work, to go back to our favorite vacation spot. Returning to the familiar is a basic instinct that gives our lives a sense of continuity and safety in a chaotic and changing universe.”

— Barbara De Angelis

“Travel is life-changing. That's the promise made by a thousand websites and magazines, by philosophers and writers down the ages. Mark Twain said it was fatal to prejudice, and Thomas Jefferson said it made you wise. Anais Nin observed that "we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls." It's all true. Self-transformation is what I sought and what I found.”

— Elisabeth Eaves

“I don't want to think about the danger, the life changing events that have fallen into our lives. I just want to live in this moment, right here, right now.”

— Brandy Nacole

“[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

— William Gibson

“The nineteenth century is called the century of hygiene, and the twentieth is the century of medicine. The twenty-first century may be the century of behavioral change. Changing everyday, long-term behaviors
how we exercise, what we eat
is the key to adding years and quality to our lives.”

— Michael Stein

“Only bad things happen quickly, ... Virtually all the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life's primary virtues.”

— Gordon Livingston

“What you don't ever catch a glimpse of on your wedding day - because how could you? - is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever changing a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. And nor do you think about your husband waking up in the morning being someone you don't recognize. If anyone thought about any of these things, then no one would ever get married. In fact, the impulse to marry would come from the same place as the same impulse to drink a bottle of bleach, and those are the kind of impulses we try to ignore rather than celebrate.
So we can't afford to think of these things because getting married - or finding a partner whom we will want to spend our lives with and have children by - is on our agenda. It's something we know we will do one day, and if you take that away from us then we are left with promotions and work and the possibility of a winning lottery ticket, and it's not enough.”

— Nick Hornby

“The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves. "And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves." She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things.”

— Virginia Woolf

“She felt as if things were moving past her as she lay stretched on the bed under the single sheet. But it's not landscape any longer, she thought; it's people's lives, their changing lives.”

— Virginia Woolf

“All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.”

— Atul Gawande

“However, when we see the world through the eyes of desire, we are always hoping that it will somehow magically provide us only good things; there will be no bad things, no painful things. Although the world actually is magically providing, that does not mean there is no pain. Pain is not a sign of things gone wrong. Our lives are actually a constant succession of pleasure and pain, getting what we want, then losing it. We experience pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, constantly changing out of our control. This is what the world is naturally providing, and still we can be happy.”

— Sharon Salzberg

“People's lives are delicate; you cannot interfere with them without running the risk of changing them profoundly. A chance remark, a careless involvement, may make the difference between a life of happiness and one of sorrow”

— Alexander McCall Smith

“We're moving cities, we're changing our name just like this hotel. You call that all right?"
"Yes," she said. "We still have each other. We still have our lives."
"How the definition of being all right changes," said Alexander.”

— Paullina Simons

“The truth is, those people we feel drawn to most might not be intended as love interests, but rather as life-changing, life-altering presences that come into our lives for reasons we can't yet understand.”

— Tonya Hurley

“Changing lives started with changing my own.”

— Alexandra Elle

“Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean-an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance”

— Jack London

“Art is not meant to change the world, but when you see people interacting, when you see an impact on their lives, then I guess in a smaller way, this is changing the world. So, that's what I believe in. That's why I'm into creating more and more interactions.”

— JR

“Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.”

— Dennis Prager

“Collaboration is important not just because it's a better way to learn. The spirit of collaboration is penetrating every institution and all of our lives. So learning to collaborate is part of equipping yourself for effectiveness, problem solving, innovation and life-long learning in an ever-changing networked economy.”

— Don Tapscott

“Current ethos in Silicon Valley is that if you build a website that people keep coming back to and is changing the lives of millions, you can eventually make money.”

— Daphne Koller

“Mom always liked to say that we hardly ever know the decisions we make that change our lives, mostly because they are little ones. You took this bus instead of that one and ended up meeting your soul mate, that kind of thing. But there was no doubt in my mind that this was one of those life-changing moments.”

— Rachel Hawkins

“We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.”

— Thomas Pynchon

“'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.”

— Jennifer Egan

“Too many people in Washington care about power institutions, not caring about changing the lives of everyday Americans.”

— Kevin McCarthy

“There are no minarets built in praise of
what doubters say, no passionate talk about their lives.
The coin faces of officials
keep changing, but not the flame-tongued book of the sun. Be plain as day and a friend to what
lasts. Cynics say the same thing over and over, "I only know what I see." Every external form is
a text to study, embodying a truth, the way medicine contains healing. Does a painter paint
for the sake of the picture and not for the eyes of those who will look at it?”

— Rumi

“All people should disclose whether they submit to Allah or not. Those who are against us are our enemies and must be fought. That includes people who call themselves Muslims but who don't lead their lives as such - people who drink, who don't pray, who don't fast, who have constantly changing partners and who are unable to recite the Koran.”

— Abdul Sattar Abu Risha

“Ted Kennedy's achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”

— Adam Clymer

“Seeing ourselves as we want to be is a key to personal growth. To successfully bring about change in our lives we need to implement a system of change that is build upon three assumptions. First Assumption: We change our lives by changing the attitudes of our minds. Second Assumption: We become what we think about all day long. Third Assumption: Our mind is naturally goal seeking. Please remember these assumptions. Our mind is always trying to accomplish something. We have a powerful machine wanting to achieve goals. It will set the goals that we allow it to.”

— Hyrum W. Smith

“There is going on in the world today a quiet, bloodless revolution. It has no fanfare, no newspaper coverage, no propaganda; yet it is changing the course of thousands of lives. It is restoring purpose and meaning to life as men of all races and nationalities are finding peace with God.”

— Billy Graham

“If everybody did just one thing. Just one thing. Not even a great thing. Not a world-changing thing, just one blessing, just one act of living kindness. The effect of each caring action, no matter how seemingly small, brings blessings into the lives of others. There may be no greater or more important thing that we can do at this instant.”

— Don Altman

“Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.”

— Ruth Ozeki

“Our lives are changing, this old world keeps turning. And I sit here and wonder, baby, what we're really learning.”

— Glenn Frey

“Change makes us confront the great unknown. It introduces different things into our lives. Different places. Different ideas. Different people. It's all hard to accept at times, and change can often be a little scary. But if there's one fact that I've learned from raising a family, from running several businesses, from serving in Congress and now as Governor, it's that nothing has ever grown without changing.”

— Bob Riley

“We wait for things to be different in order to feel okay with life. As long as we keep attaching our happiness to the external events of our lives, which are ever changing, we'll always be left waiting for it.”

— Tara Brach

“We make up any excuse to preserve myths about people we love, but the reverse is also true; if we dislike an individual we adamantly resist changing our opinion, even when somebody offers proof of his decency, because it's vital to have myths about both the gods and devils in our lives.”

— Marlon Brando

“It's really special to be a part of something that's really changing lives.”

— Debby Ryan

“I've often said that we are doing something far more important than just selling cosmetics; we are changing lives.”

— Mary Kay Ash

“The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole.”

— Starhawk

“I think we rarely recognize the fifth business in our lives at the time those people are changing us.”

— Stephen King

“When women are pessimistic about their political strength and feel hopeless about changing the conditions of their lives, it is almost as if they do not believe that democracy means the country belongs to them. But it's true.”

— Naomi Wolf

“Living is not this tawdry, mediocre, disciplined thing which we call our existence. Living is something entirely different; it is abundantly rich, timelessly changing, and as long as we don't understand that eternal movement, our lives are bound to have very little meaning.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Our soldiers did not go to some foreign country and risk their lives in vain and defend our Constitution so that decades later you can tell me it's a living document ever changing and is open to interpretation. The guys who wrote it were light years ahead of anyone today, and they meant what they said - now leave the document alone, or there's going to be trouble.”

— Ted Nugent

“Samsara-the Wheel of Existence, literally, the "Perpetual Wandering"-is the name by which is designated the sea of life ever restlessly heaving up and down, the symbol of this continuous process of ever again and again being born, growing old, suffering, and dying. (It) is constantly changing from moment to moment, (as lives) follow continuously one upon the other through inconceivable periods of time. Of this Samsara, a single lifetime constitutes only a vanishingly tiny fraction.”

— Gautama Buddha

“You can laugh at Christianity; you can mock and ridicule it. But it works. It changes lives. If you trust Christ, start watching your attitudes and actions, because Jesus Christ is in the business of changing lives.”

— Josh McDowell

“Even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.”

— George Santayana

“It is the government's strong desire to empower this fabric, this social fabric of our society where faith-based programs large and small feel empowered, encouraged, and welcomed into changing lives.”

— George W. Bush

“If we can bring spiritual energy, which is love, kindness, forgiveness and so on, to the problem, we can dissolve it. It's really just a matter of changing our mind about how we're going to process the events in our lives.”

— Wayne Dyer

“By changing our inner state of mind, we can change any suffering or hardship into a source of joy, regarding it as a means for forging and developing our lives. To turn even sorrow into a source of creativity - this is the way of life of a Buddhist”

— Daisaku Ikeda

“I'm not in the speech making business. I'm not in the seminar business. I'm not in the writing book business. I'm in the changing lives business.”

— Zig Ziglar