I can't change what's happened to me in my life, or make what's not occurred take place. But I can't say I like it, or accept it, or believe it's for the best. I don't and never shall, not even if I'm damned for it.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time.

In a world of rapid change, we each need to garner as much useful information as possible, sort through it in a way that meets our unique circumstances, calibrate it with what we already know, and re-circulate it with others who share our goals.

This is where life as I knew it changed. This is where a new feeling slowly, eventually, permeated every cell of my body, changing the way I took in the world. My perceptions, opinions, everything changed the year I moved from Texas to Virginia.

I know you better then anyone. You’re practically my son, and I think that it’s the fact that you don’t want to see her leave. You are afraid of change.” He paused; he was right. “You are afraid that she will change.

As for change? Even the smallest things count. If you can tell an entire crowd of youth the right thing,95% might not hear you out but that 5% may be able to use that knowledge to progress and expand in life. That's who the message for. 

Sometimes you’ll hear, ‘People don’t change.’ This is true more often than it ought to be, but listen again: ‘People don’t change.’ It says ‘don’t,’ not ‘can’t.’ (316)

Like the bud of a flower, change forces you to surrender to growth. It makes you vulnerable. It requires you to enlarge, expand and become bigger. Like the oxygen provided with each breath, we are denied its benefits until we relax and breathe in.

You know you are on the right spiritual track when you realize that doing the right thing is not something you should do; rather, it is something you want to do. It is even something you have to do for your own peace, and the well-being of others.

When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it’s dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment

Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

Close your eyes and breathe in, concentrate on the breath and heart beat, feel that? You are a living being capable of changing your life and possibly the lives around you, you do not merely exist, your actions affect you and others. Act with love.

It was then, there in the darkness, with only those little pin-points of light to see by, light from a world away where other people with their own problems and their own secrets lived their own lives, that everything in our world changed for good.