W. H. Auden Quotes

The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.

For stubborn souls like Lisette, death was easier than the courage it took to actually change your life.

All of my unconscious fears were in my face about letting go of the current identity. A lot of the thoughts that came up were fear-based and false, so I had to work to let them go.

Because the fundamental human problem is that people are afraid of change.

A man does not mind being blamed for his faults, and being punished for them, and he patiently suffers much for them; but he becomes impatient if he is required to give them up.

Inertia is comforting, and Americans will be extremely reluctant to make any change that might affect their high standard of living.

I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring.

A person who refuses to risk change fails to grow.

What if I told you that 10 years from now, your life would be exactly the same? I doubt you would be happy. So, why are you so afraid of change?

People will suffer almost anything, as long as it means they don't have to change.

You will be stupid. You will worry your parents. You will question your own choices, your relationships, your jobs, your friends, where you live, what you studied in college, that you went to college at all... If that happens, you're doing it right.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

Change is hard, I should know. I should know.

You can suffer the pain of change or suffer remaining the way you are.

Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that's okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't--and perhaps loses track of just where she is.

The only way I knew I was ready to come out was I was being driven crazy by the fact that I was not out.

I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die.

I whispered, 'I am too young,' and then, 'I am old enough'; wherefore I threw a penny to find out if I might love.

All through the night, she battled herself. Or battled to know herself. She fell apart and then put herself back together and then she fell apart again and put herself back together, over and over.

You're dying with the way things are," Della Lee said harshly, causing Josey to lower the handful of popcorn she was about to put in her mouth. "You're going to lose yourself in this, Josey. It's going to happen if you don't change. I know. I lost myself trying to find happiness in things that didn't love me back.

Does a man shrink from change? Why, what can come into being save by change?

How much time, creative energy, and emotion do we expend resisting change because we assume growth must always be painful? Much personal growth is uncomfortable, but it's worse to thwart the ascent of your authenticity.

I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.

I still haven't found the place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.

When there's trouble I don't like running, but I'm afraid I got more in common with who I was, than who I am becoming