Time & Change quotes for UPSC & State PCS

The future is purchased by the present.

Change is one thing, progress is another.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

You can never plan the future by the past.

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.

Wait for that wisest of all counselors, Time.

All is ephemeral — fame and the famous as well.

The crisis of yesterday is the joke of to-morrow.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

Dangers await only those who do not react to life.

Whatever can be done another day can be done today.

All that time is lost which might be better employed.

All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative.

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. (Hays translation)

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

Nothing should be treasured more highly than the value of the day.

To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.

Is any man afraid of change? Why what can take place without change?

What's old collapses, times change, And new life blossoms in the ruins.

Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to the present.

The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.

Lord Illingworth: Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

Time ripens all things. No man is born wise. Bishops are made of men and not of stones.

Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not. (Heraclitus Homericus)

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried.

Time will be gained, and time usually provides a sweet ending for many bitter difficulties.

One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough.

Behold now, Bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to decay. Strive with diligence!

The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative — to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.

Society presses upon us all the time. The progress of the last half century is the progress of the frog out of his well.

Neither a wise man or a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.

Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.

When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?

There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and never return. (Hays translation)

The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.

Our bodies are perishable, wealth is not at all permanent and death is always nearby. Therefore we must immediately engage in acts of merit.

Catch then, O! catch the transient hour, Improve each moment as it flies; Life's a short Summer — man a flower, He dies — alas! how soon he dies!

When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.

It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

Lead the ideas of your time and they will accompany and support you; fall behind them and they drag you along with them; oppose them and they will overwhelm you.

Time is always moving on; nothing can stop it. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. The more compassionate you are, the more you will find inner peace.

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.

Procrastination is one of the most common causes of failure.... Procrastination stands within the shadow of every human being, waiting his opportunity to spoil one's chances of success.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

He that would pass the latter part of life with honour and decency, must, when he is young, consider that he shall one day be old; and remember, when he is old, that he has once been young.

The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

In politics nothing is immutable. Events carry within them an invincible power. The unwise destroy themselves in resistance. The skillful accept events, take strong hold of them and direct them.

We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

A love of tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril; but the new view must come, the world must roll forward ... Let us have no fear of the future.

It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works, if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.

Since it is every man's interest to be happy through the whole of life, it is the wisdom of every one to employ philosophy in the search of felicity without delay; and there cannot be a greater folly, than to be always beginning to live.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight.

I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.

We present a dramatically different approach to time management. This is a principle-centered approach. It transcends the traditional prescriptions of faster, harder, smarter, and more. Rather than offering you another clock, this approach provides you with a compass — because more important than how fast you're going, is where you're headed.

Truth was the only daughter of Time.

Idleness is only fatal to the mediocre.

Greatness is nothing unless it be lasting.

We celebrate the past to awaken the future.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

The truth can wait, for she lives a long life.

Do not look back upon what has been done. Go ahead!

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing.

For all that has been — Thanks! To all that shall be — Yes!

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

Don’t shortchange the future, because of fear in the present.

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation!

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

Unhappy the general who comes on the field of battle with a system.

All becoming and growing—all that guarantees a future—involves pain.

Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

A government which cannot be reformed does not merit to be preserved.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.

What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.

It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

The transformation of the world is brought about by the transformation of oneself.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

There are, in every age, new errors to be rectified, and new prejudices to be opposed.

Time destroys the figments of the imagination, while confirming the judgments of nature.

Time's glory is to calm contending kings, To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.

All those [events in history] were such dramas as we see now, only with different actors.

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

There is no change without risk, and no progress without sacrifice, and no freedom without solidarity.

Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is alright, as long your values don't change.

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

Revolutions hew the past to pieces and cast it into a cauldron, but what has emerged is the old Aeson with a new visage.

The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.

a matter in regard to which if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody

Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.

The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball — the further I am rolled the more I gain.

Don't judge the future of a person based on his present conditions, because time has the power to change black coal to shiny diamond.

We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery.

War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface.

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation.

So in all human affairs one notices, if one examines them closely, that it is impossible to remove one inconvenience without another emerging.

The time is always ripe for the re-interpretation of theories in the light of new vision and of new facts. This is the very province of science.

Each work has to pass through these stages—ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Those who think ahead of their time are sure to be misunderstood.

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.

All true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree — not of a cloud.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform.

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.

Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy. But there is no dream that lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one.

Unlike the laws of physics... every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this... fuels change.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination... everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people will be living... on Mars and Pluto. ...[N]obody foresaw the Internet.

We meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.

Cities and Thrones and Powers, Stand in Time's eye, Almost as long as flowers, Which daily die: But, as new buds put forth To glad new men, Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth, The Cities rise again.

Time after time, history ran over the luddites and romanticists, those who sought to restore the old and delay the new. And every time, history did it with faster, more reliable and more advanced vehicles.

All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.

The world turns and the world changes, But one thing does not change. In all of my years, one thing does not change, However you disguise it, this thing does not change: The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

One of the blessings of age is to learn not to part on a note of sharpness, to treasure the moments spent with those we love, and to make them whenever possible good to remember, for time is short. (5 February 1943)

... culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological — technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science.

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

You did in your twenties what you knew how to do, and when you knew better you did better. And you should not be judged for the person that you were, but for the person that you're trying to be and the woman that you are now.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.

The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past, but I do not see why we should merely repeat them and not go farther. In the spiritual development of the consciousness upon earth the great past ought to be followed by a greater future.

No matter how dark the cloud, there is always a thin, silver lining, and that is what we must look for. The silver lining will come, if not to us then to next generation or the generation after that. And maybe with that generation the lining will no longer be thin.

We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow.

We know that progress can always be reversed, and that positive change is achieved not through passion alone, but through patient and persistent effort. But we’ve seen things change for the better in this region and around the world because of the effort of ordinary people, together -- working together.

An ardent affection for the human race makes enthusiastic characters eager to produce alteration in laws and governments prematurely. To render them useful and permanent, they must be the growth of each particular soil, and the gradual fruit of the ripening understanding of the nation, matured by time, not forced by an unnatural fermentation.