inner changes Quotes

“Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”

“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

“Years ago, a wise friend told me that no one ever changes until the pain level gets high enough.”

“If your life is going to change, you must think for a change. You are always only one thought away from changing your life.”

“There lay the pity of it. An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry-farm.”

“Then the thought of killing a wild boar in single-handed combat struck him dumb with wonder. Why, he would never have dreamed such a thing in Hikueru! He was Mafatu, the Boy Who Was Afraid.”

“Nothing around them had changed; and yet, for her, something more momentous had happened than if the mountains had been shoved aside.”

“I wasn’t the same scared little girl he met that night in the church, and I was going to make sure that he knew it.”

“He was full of the restless, dissatisfied energy that always seemed to move into his heart after he visited home these days. It had something to do with the knowledge that his parents’ house wasn’t truly home anymore — if it had ever been — and something to do with the realization that they hadn’t changed; he had.”

“We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.”

“Maybe your situation is going to change when you change.”

“I am going to say yes to everything.” “Everything? What do you mean everything?” Ian looked shocked. “When do you start?” “That’s just the thing, ” I said, finishing my pint and looking him dead in the eye. “I already have.”

“I know that I have a choice, and I choose to change no matter what the cost.”

“But what he’d shown me about myself wasn’t glamorous. It was worrying. It was something I had to change. And luckily he’d shown me the way.”

“Because the thing is, what the man on the bus had said to me made complete and utter sense. I know it sounds odd, and I know it might seem meaningless to you, but to me those three words had... done something.”

“As the years went by, though, Mary Alice and I grew up, and though Grandma never changed, we’d seem to see a different woman every summer.”

“If you don’t get out of that old house, you’ll waste away, a bitter woman like your mother and grandmother.”

“I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air. We can reposition ourselves for the victory that God intends for us.”

“It’s not what you will get out of the books that are so enriching, it is what the books will get out of you that will ultimately change your life.”

“That makes Mount Eskel important even to lowlanders.”

“I noticed that my fear never changed, never delighted, never offered a surprise twist or an unexpected ending.”

“The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and above all--oh, above all else--ambitious.”

“Sometimes I think I have felt everything I’m ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I’m not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I’ve already felt.”

“It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. ”

“If you don’t like the way your life is going, redesign it.”

“To deny the realities of change in our lives is to pretend that the forces of gravity won’t pull the ripe apple from the tree.”

“Things aren’t different. Things are things.”

“God does hear what we pray. You don’t need a megaphone or a million people to get His attention. But the point of prayer is not to get what we want. Prayer changes the person who prays.”

“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.”

“In the summer of 1922 a family friend gave him a biography of Leonardo da Vinci that so inspired him he transferred to Columbia University to ‘shift my interest from science to cultural history’ and the humanities.”

“You must change people’s minds. And you can’t just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something as meaningful as what they’ve lost--something that makes better sense than the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn’t serve his needs directly or indirectly.”

“None of that used to be in Brian and now it was a part of him, a changed part of him, a grown part of him, and the two things, his mind and his body, had come together as well, had made a connection with each other that he didn’t quite understand.”

“All she knew was that whatever and whoever climbed out of that abyss of despair and grief would not be the same person who had plummeted in.”