Change & Renewal

The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.

Augustine of Hippo Confessions

Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Acquire the contemplative way of seeing how all things change into one another, and constantly attend to it, and exercise thyself about this part [of philosophy]. For nothing is so much adapted to produce magnanimity.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

The Beginning of Philosophy is a Consciousness of your own Weakness and inability in necessary things.

Epictetus Discourses & Enchiridion

Ηe knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance. • Alternate translation: I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

Socrates Apology (via Plato)

Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men—lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, lovers of gain?

Plato The Republic & Dialogues

A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end.

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics

Among the appliances to transform the people, sound and appearances are but trivial influences.

Confucius The Analects (Lunyu)

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Laozi Tao Te Ching

If he goes forth from the household life into homelessness, then he will become an Arahant, a fully-enlightened Buddha, one who draws back the veil from the world.

Gautama Buddha Dhammapada & Sutta Pitaka

I always thought that I was me — but no,I was you and never knew it.

Rumi Masnavi & Divan-e Shams

The desert grows: woe to him in whom deserts hide ...

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra & Beyond Good and Evil

Men of action, when they are without faith, have never believed in anything but action. Hitler's untenable paradox lay precisely in wanting to found a stable order on perpetual change and no negation.

Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus & Notebooks

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.

Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or & Journals

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena

He knew she was there by the joy and fear that overwhelmed his heart.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace & A Calendar of Wisdom

As testy sick men when their deaths be near, No news but health from their physicians know.

William Shakespeare First Folio & Sonnets

We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

Oscar Wilde De Profundis & Essays

As I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious.

Mark Twain Notebooks & Autobiography

As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First and Second Series

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

Henry David Thoreau Walden

Mysore has been rightly considered one of the most progressive of States in India and, in several respects, far in advance of conditions obtaining in British India. There is progress in all directions.

Mahatma Gandhi The Story of My Experiments with Truth

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom

We grow despite the horror that we feed upon our own tomorrow. We grow.

Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings & Essays

Attributed to Einstein's 1930 arrival in New York on the Belgenland, the pithy phrase about the future may have been a later reflection inserted into his archives.

Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions

Many harebrained interpretations were also widely available, especially in weekly newspapers.

Carl Sagan Cosmos & Pale Blue Dot