W. Edwards Deming Quotes

It is interesting to see all you fellows here. It will even be more interesting to see how many of you will be here a few months from now.

Throughout the history of el Bulli, there have been many changes in its organisation or philosophy. This is another one of those moments. There will be risk, and freedom, and creativity. But there won't be opening hours, or reservations, or routines.

A frog in love would not be enchanted to learn that her beloved had turned into Prince Charming.

Leaders have followers, managers have employees. Managers make widgets, leaders make change.

The new leader is one who commits people to action, who converts followers into leaders, and who may convert leaders into agents of change.

That is the key challenge facing management today; change is the only constant.

Ain't it funny how a moment could just change your life, and you don't want to face what's wrong or right. Ain't it strange how fate can play a part, in the story of your heart.

Y'all were heroes from the beginning. You just didn't 'turn' all of a sudden

If you want change, you've got to stick with it.

Hope and change are hard-fought things.

If you're dating a man who you think might be "Mr. Right," if he a) got older, b) got a new job, or c) visited a psychiatrist, you are in for a nasty surprise. The cocoon-to-butterfly theory only works on cocoons and butterflies.

We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.

Presume not that I am the thing I was.

[T]he essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man Alive, and his "philosophy" must grow, must flow, with him. . . . the man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow - and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.

And once begun, change cannot be reversed.

I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made fo figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.

I think life goes through a cycle of losing and refinding yourself all the time. Everyone has disappointments all the time, some of them pretty small, some of them pretty big.

That's what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with your head held high. Times change. It's those that see it coming, and plan for it, and change themselves to suit, that prosper.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

I want to know what became of the changes we waited for love to bring/Were they only the fitful dreams of some greater awakening?

I want to make change, but I've already made change. I will continue to make change. I'm not just running on a promise of change.

There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That’s the end. That’s when the coffin is closed. You might be deteriorating physically in the long process of aging, but your personal process of daily discovery is ongoing. You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.