M. H. Abrams Quotes

You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

There are never any absolutes in the fashion business: one day you may like black, and the next day you like colour. I think it's a good lesson that we should never believe too much in any one thing - because the next day it's out, and if we're stuck to it, we're out, too.

These are the instructions you are getting today. It is only fair to tell you, however, that they may be changed tomorrow. And ten days later they may be changed back to the instructions you are getting now.

It's very easy to think that the way things are is the way things will stay, and life just isn't like that.

Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

Everything changes permantly. How boring if it wouldn't.

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

Life is full of change and uncertainty. We know this. We experience it on a daily basis.

There is nothing permanent except change.

The world's a scene of changes, and to be constant, in nature were inconstancy.

It's not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone's life seems to be. That, I think, is what I'm writing about.

Stability is not the way of the world.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

You can predict all you want, but everybody knows what predictions get you.

If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.

History is a fickle lady.

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent or vital has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.

Everything isn't permanent, so don't pretend that it is. Everything's supposed to move and shift.

What's good for you one day will not necessarily still be good for you the day after.

Everything changes with time. You can't predict where you're gonna be next year; you have no idea, you know what I mean?

Life is like this: things come and go.