Albert EinsteinSourced
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
Source: Letter to his son Eduard (5 February 1930)
Checked quotes about change
15 quotes with a known source.
George Bernard ShawSourced
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Source: Man and Superman, "Maxims for Revolutionists" (1903)
George Bernard ShawSourced
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
Source: Everybody's Political What's What? (1944)
Friedrich NietzscheSourced
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue §5 (1883)
Marcus AureliusSourced
The universe is transformation: life is opinion.
Source: Meditations 4.3, tr. George Long
Lao TzuSourced
The journey of a thousand li commences with a single step.
A li is about half a kilometre — "a thousand miles" is a later rounding.
Source: Tao Te Ching, ch. 64, tr. James Legge
Leo TolstoyAttributed
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Source: Condensed from the essay "Three Methods of Reform" (1900)
Franz KafkaSourced
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
Source: Zürau Aphorisms, no. 5 (1917–18)
HeraclitusSourced
The way up and the way down are one and the same.
Source: Fragment B60
HeraclitusAttributed
You cannot step twice into the same river.
Plato's paraphrase; Heraclitus' own fragment (B12) speaks of different waters flowing over those who step into the same rivers.
Source: Reported by Plato, Cratylus 402a
Niccolò MachiavelliSourced
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
Source: The Prince, ch. 6, tr. W. K. Marriott
Karl MarxSourced
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Source: Theses on Feuerbach, XI (1845)
Lewis CarrollSourced
It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, ch. 10 (1865)
Carl JungSourced
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Source: Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)
Percy Bysshe ShelleySourced
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Source: "Ode to the West Wind" (1820)
Famous, but not theirs
Quotes about change that are usually credited to the wrong person.
Albert EinsteinNot theirs
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Actually: Appears in a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous text and in Rita Mae Brown's novel Sudden Death (1983). Not in any Einstein source.
Mahatma GandhiMisquoted
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
The real words: A modern condensation. What Gandhi wrote (Indian Opinion, 1913) is longer: "If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change… We need not wait to see what others do."
Lao TzuNo source found
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.
The trail: No such line in any translation of the Tao Te Ching.
Charles DarwinNot theirs
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Actually: Leon C. Megginson, a management professor, paraphrasing Darwin in a 1963 speech.
Victor HugoMisquoted
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
The real words: Condensed from Histoire d'un crime (1877): an invasion of armies can be resisted, an invasion of ideas cannot.
George EliotNot theirs
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
Actually: Not found in any of Eliot's novels, essays or letters. It was attached to her name in the late 20th century.
Carl JungMisquoted
What you resist persists.
The real words: A modern self-help slogan loosely based on Jung's ideas; the sentence is not in his works.
Henry FordNot theirs
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
Actually: No evidence Ford said it; it appears only in the late 1990s.
Antoine de Saint-ExupéryMisquoted
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood… teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
The real words: A free modern paraphrase of a passage in Citadelle (1948). The ship-building wording is not his.