Quotes about Change
Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Break the monotony. Do something strange and extravagant!
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The surest poison is time.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we fear of doing most is usually what we most need to do.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If there is any period one would desire to be born in, ? is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wherever a man comes, there comes a revolution. The old is for slaves.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson