This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their centre." - George Santayana
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness…. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it…. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience." - George Santayana
"To change and to change for the better are two different things." - German Proverbs
"Never underestimate your power to change yourself; never overestimate your power to change others." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
"Men make history and not the other way round. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better." - Harry S. Truman
"All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names...cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends...Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thought. God will see that you do not want society... There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Things do not change; we change." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them." - Henry Steele Commager
"All things much change to something new, to something strange." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual exercise of God’s power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual existence of God's power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If spring came but once in a century instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. The most tranquil house, with the most serene inhabitants, living upon the utmost regularity of system, is yet exemplifying infinite diversities." - Henry Ward Beecher
"All is flux, nothing is stationary...There is nothing permanent except change." - Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL
"There is nothing so permanent in life as change." - Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL
"Nothing endures but change." - Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL
"Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season." -
"No radical change on the plane of history is possible without crime." - Hermann Keyserling, fully Hermann Alexander Graf Keyserling
"The challenges of change are always hard. It is important that we begin to unpack those challenges that confront this nation and realize that we each have a role that requires us to change and become more responsible for shaping our own future." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"One may derive information from the regimen of persons in good health what things are proper; for if it appear that there is a great difference whether the diet be so and so, in other respects, but more especially in the changes, how can it be otherwise in diseases, and more especially in the acute? But it is well ascertained that even a faulty diet of food and drink steadily persevered in, is safer in the main as regards health than if one suddenly change to another." - Hippocrates, fully known as Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos NULL
"Change a virtue in its circumstances and it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges." - Hippolyte Adolphe Taine
"In the heat of [social] movements brains are set stirring with new ideas which live on through quieter times, waiting for another opportunity to ignite into action and change the world around us." - Howard Zinn
"Missing from [history] are the countless small actions of unknown people that led up to those great moments. When we understand this, we can see that the tiniest acts of protest in which we engage may become the invisible roots of social change." - Howard Zinn
"In all change of appearances substance is permanent; its quantum in nature is neither increased nor diminished." - Immanuel Kant
"Why this reluctance to make the change? We fear the process of reeducation! Adults have invested endless hours of learning in growing accustomed to inches and miles; to February’s twenty-eight days; to “night” and “debt” with their silent letters; to qwertyuiop; and to all the rest. To introduce something altogether new would mean to begin all over, to become ignorant again, and to run the old, old risk of failing to learn." - Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
"To blind oneself to change is not to halt it." - Isaac Goldberg
"In many spiritual traditions there is only one important question to answer, and that question is: Who am I? When we begin to answer it, we are filled with images and ideals – the negative images of ourselves that we wish to change and perfect and the positive images of some great spiritual potential – yet the path is not so much about changing ourselves as it is about listening to the fundamentals of our being." - Jack Kornfield
"The weak-minded change their opinions because they are easily influenced by others, and the strong-minded change their opinions because they have complete mastery over their opinions." - Jacob Klatzkin
"Public education is a great instrument of social change... Education is a social proceeds, perhaps the most important process in determining the future of our country; it should command a far larger portion of our national income than it does today." - James Bryant Conant
"Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought... The people who live in fear of disease are the people who get it... Change of diet will not help a man who will not change his thoughts. When a man makes his thoughts pure, he no longer desires impure food... Clean thoughts make clean habits." -
"The basic fact today is the tremendous pace of change in the human life." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"The wheel of change moves on, and those who were down go up and those who were up go down." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world." - Jean Houston
"Like flakes of snow that fall imperceptibly upon the earth, the seemingly unimportant events of life succeed one another. As snowflakes gather, so our habits are formed. No single flake that is added to the pile produces a sensible change. No single action creates, however it may exhibit a man's character. But as the tempest hurls the avalanche down the mountain and overwhelms the inhabitant and his habitation, so passion, acting on the elements of mischief which pernicious habits have brought together, may overthrow the edifice of truth and virtue." - Jeremy Bentham
"We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions." - Jessamyn West, fully Mary Jessamyn West
"Both inner and outer hearing, which cannot be separated, change consciousness to a greater extent than anything else in our eye-orientated age." - Joachim-Ernst Berendt
"Your story is always open to revision. To revise literally means to “see again.” Seeing your story from the vantage point of the soul can change your future for the better, no matter what the past may have been." - Joan Borysenko
"A capacity to change is indispensable. Equally indispensable is the capacity to hold fast to that which is good." - John Foster Dulles
"The problem in those people who formed their ideas in the 1940's and the 1950's and have never changed them as the world changed. There is something wrong with people who make up their minds and don't change them." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"When circumstances change, I change my view; what do you do?" - John Maynard Keynes
"The enormous influence of novelty - the way in which it quickens observation, sharpens sensation, and exalts sentiment - is not half enough taken note of by us, and is to me a very sorrowful matter. And yet, if we try to obtain perpetual change, change itself will become monotonous." - John Ruskin
"The truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one form the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike." - John Ruskin
"They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men, that most love variety and change." - John Ruskin
"`Change' is scientific, 'progress' is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy." - John Ruskin
"It is in the nature of a man as he grows older... to protest against change, particularly change for the better." - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck