If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.
changequotes
It is better to change an opinion than to persist in a wrong one.
The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not fighting the old, but on building the new.
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Indeed, it is evident that the mere passage of time itself is destructive rather than generative because change is primarily a ‘passing away’. So it is only incidentally that time is the cause of things coming into being and existing.
I know, of course, he said, that bacon for breakfast is an English institution, almost as old as parliamentary government. But still, don’t you think we might occasionally have a change, Dorothy?
If God had wanted to put everything into the world from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man’s experience of change. But He seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.
Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, “Lighthouses” as the poet said “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers,magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.
Only here is suffering really suffering. Not in the way that those who suffer here are to be ennobled in some other world for their suffering, but that what passes for suffering in this world is, in another world, without any change and merely without its contrariety, bliss.
Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.
