C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Change
I am not what I once was.
All things human change.
Nought may endure but mutability.
Revolutions are not made; they come.
Do not think that years leave us and find us the same!
Change still doth reign, and keep the greater sway.
Change generally pleases the rich.
What I possess I would gladly retain; change amuses the mind, yet scarcely profits.
In this world of change, nought which comes stays, and nought which goes is last.
“Passing away” is written on the world, and all the world contains.
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure.
Nothing maintains its bloom forever; age succeeds age.
Bodies are slow of growth, but are rapid in their dissolution.
As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.
The lazy ox wishes for horse-trappings, and the steed wishes to plough.
He pulls down, he builds up, he changes squares into circles.
The world is a scene of changes, and to be constant in nature were inconstancy.
The great world spins forever down the ringing grooves of change.
Changing hands without changing measures is as if a drunkard in a dropsy should change his doctors, and not his diet.
There is nothing in the world that remains unchanged. All things are in perpetual flux, and every shadow is seen to move.
Believe, if thou wilt, that mountains change their places, but believe not that man changes his nature.
Can any one find out in what condition his body will be, I do not say a year hence, but this evening?
There is nothing better fitted to delight the reader than change of circumstances and varieties of fortune.
He is less likely to be mistaken who looks forward to a change in the affairs of the world than he who regards them as firm and stable.
As the blessings of health, and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.
Everything that is created is changed by the laws of man; the earth does not know itself in the revolution of years; even the races of man assume various forms in the course of ages.
We do not know either unalloyed happiness or unmitigated misfortune. Everything in this world is a tangled yarn; we taste nothing in its purity; we do not remain two moments in the same state. Our affections as well as bodies, are in a perpetual flux.
To-day is not yesterday; we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed, is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
The life of any one can by no means be changed after death; an evil life can in no wise be converted into a good life, or an infernal into an angelic life: because every spirit, from head to foot, is of the character of his love, and, therefore, of his life; and to convert this life into its opposite would be to destroy the spirit utterly.
Such are the vicissitudes of the world, through all its parts, that day and night, labor and rest, hurry and retirement, endear each other; such are the changes that keep the mind in action: we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else and begin a new pursuit.
Perfection is immutable. But for things imperfect, change is the way to perfect them. It gets the name of wilfulness when it will not admit of a lawful change to the better. Therefore constancy without knowledge cannot be always good. In things ill it is not virtue, but an absolute vice.