Jacques Barzun Quotes

Everyone is constantly transitioning.

Progress knows nothing of fixity. It cannot be pressed into a definite mould…. Progress is ever renewing, ever becoming, ever changing--never is it within the law.

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.

Life is fluid, ever evolving. The more dynamic you are, the more happens in your life, all the time.

Progress grows out of motion.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.

The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.

As we step out of the way new things are born.

Stories are like a river that flows - you dip a bucket in it

All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.

Everything is perpetually becoming new.

You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.

In English we say 'we are' but it's proper to say 'we are becoming' because things are becoming.

The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; it simply flies on.

The only thing that changes as we evolve is the idea of what serves us.

Anything is better than stagnation.

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?

Few - very few - of our attainments are so profound that they are valid for always; even if they are so, they need adjustment, a straightening here, a loosening there, like an old garment to be fitted to the body.

I came to Nantes two-years-ago and it's much the same today, except that it's totally different.

So often I heard people paying blind obeisance to change - as though it had some virtue of its own. Change or we will die. Change or we will stagnate. Evergreens don't stagnate.

All change is change for the better. There is no such thing as "change for the worse." Change is the process of Life Itself, and that process could be called by the name 'evolution.' And evolution moves in only one direction: forward, and toward improvement.

All things change, nothing perishes.

Yesterday's answers has nothing to do with today's questions.

There is no improving the future without disturbing the present.