Change

Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

The beginning is always today.

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

The job is not to catch up to the status quo; the job is to invent the status quo.

Every individual has the power to make a difference in the world.

Unity is the key to creating lasting change in our communities.

Change is possible, but it will be hard.

My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.

We are all like the bright moon, we still have our darker side.

Do not suppose the statements of the prophets to be true; they are all fabrications. Men lived comfortably till they came and spoiled life.

The past resembles the future more than one drop of water resembles another.

In the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.

I am enriched by my convent, by the present, by the future, by Italy, by England.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Fashion, a tyrant to many a thrall and enslaver of delight, the matrix of appearing and the mould of mirth, changing and defying the changes and yet compact of contradiction.

Give a man enough rope and he will hang himself. When Darwin first saw this, how do you think he felt?

We are far more liable to be caught in the quicksands of degeneracy than in the whirlwind of passion.

One always begins by imitating.

Literature can, and always has, played a significant role in movements for social and political change.