You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.
Reform the world within thyself, which is thy proper world.
I think one of the things that I was struck by was that Joe has the financial wherewithal to go check into some expensive clinic, go into rehab and beat these addictions but he didn't. He sort of designed his own, you know, sort of rehabilitation at home. And anybody could do what he did. When he felt like having a cigarette after he ate, he would get up and walk. At cocktail hour when he used to have a drink and watch the news, he stopped watching the news. He couldn't. He couldn't watch the news and not have a drink and a cigarette. He would walk.
You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself.
Please let us [Arabs] have ownership of our own reform effort. We cannot ask the world not to interfere unless we are prepared to have our own vision for reform: Rights of women, educational reform, economic reform—all of them.
Avoid openly trying to reform people. Every man knows he is imperfect, but he doesn't want someone else trying to correct his faults. If you want to improve a person, help him embrace a higher working goal-a standard, an ideal-and he will do his own 'making over' far more effectively than you can do it for him.
The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
He who goes about to reform the world must begin with himself, or he loses his labor.
It is my great desire to reform my subjects, and yet I am ashamed to confess that I am unable to reform myself.
Change in yourself what you want to change in the world.
I do not act, and people become reformed by themselves.
Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed; it is itself a reform.
I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.
The healthy Christian is not necessarily the extrovert, ebullient Christian, but the Christian who has a sense of God's presence stamped deep on his soul, who trembles at God's word, who lets it dwell in him richly by constant meditation upon it, and who tests and reforms his life daily in response to it.
He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.
The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.
Challenges, when you're in a tumultuous situation, are an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to get closer to God, an opportunity to find and kind of reform yourself, and to figure out what really matters and what your priorities are.
