Quotes & Sayings About Trying To Change The Past

I've been 15 years in the nut ward, for trying to stop the trees from being cut down, from trying to rearrange the lifestyle of a bunch of people who don't want to change. But they're gonna change because a cold wind is blowing. You're gonna change or else there's going to be no life left on the planet Earth. — Charles Manson

It was easy to be good and kind in times of plenty. The trying times were the moments that defined a man.
And love? Love was something that did much to change a person. It brought joy as it brought suffering, and in turn brought about those moments that defined one's character. Love gave life to the lifeless. It was the greatest of all living powers.
But, as with all things, love had a dark side to it. — Renee Ahdieh

Trying to change someone only makes them cling to their existing behavior with brutish, primal force. — Brian D'Ambrosio

- "How about flipping a coin;" she made a pretty remark and the two women turned around and
looked at her irritated.
- "That's right, go ahead, jock about it. You are not the one trying to change her heart, I am, and you
know damn well how painful that can be!"
Sand of Passion — Georgia Kakalopoulou

Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down - a thing not always easy to do. "Son, do you know what history is?"
"Uh ... stuff that happened in the past?"
"Nope," he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. "History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap. Right now, we're standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we'll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That's why your folks' clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who's destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving. — Stephen King

We cannot change the past, she thought. How we long to sometimes, trying to work out how horror might have been averted by a fluke of fortune, a kind intercession, wisdom not yet granted. — Anne M. Chappel

The past cannot be changed, but the future is yours. Don't waste it trying to change the unchangeable. — Cristiane Serruya

X-Men is not a story about superheroes, but a story about the ongoing revolutionary struggle between good/new and bad/old. The X-Men are every rebel teenager wanting to change the world and make it better. Humanity is every adult, clinging to the past, trying to destroy the future even as he places all his hopes there. — Grant Morrison

Steve [sports psychiatrist] had already taught me to try and stop worrying so much about pleasing everyone. We knew that this was one of my most draining flaws and he again used three groups to clarify my thinking. There would always be some people, Steve said, who would care about me and love me. In contrast there would also be a select group of people who would never warm to me - no matter what I did. And in the middle came the overwhelming mass who were largely indifferent to any of my failures or triumphs. I needed to understand that most people didn't really care what I did or said. All my anguish about how they might perceive me was redundant. Steve helped me realize that I spent too much time trying to please those oblivious people in the middle or, more problematically, the small group who would never change their critical opinion of me. I should concentrate on the people who really did show concern for me. — Victoria Pendleton

Last spring, David had offered this crazy solution to our woes, only half in jest: ... "What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together- in misery, but happy to not be apart." Let it be a testimony to how desperately I love this guy that I have spent the last ten months giving that offer serious consideration. The other alternative in the backs of our minds, of course, was that one of us might change. He might become more open and affectionate, not withholding himself from anyone who loves him on the fear that she will eat his soul. Or I might learn how to ... stop trying to eat his soul. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it. — Tom Shippey

But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children's history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame. — Ruth Ozeki

I have several things that I'm working on and trying to put together. It's hard to say exactly what's next. I think I know what it is, but until I'm actually doing it, I never want to say because things change. — David Robert Mitchell

Approach your own inner life with a loving quality that accepts who you are without trying to change who you are. — Laozi

Don't try and change me. Women always try to change men. It never works. I'm not trying to change you. I'm trying to work with you. — Lisa Scottoline

Who was that?"

"A one-night stand that didn't want to let go."

Alexis looked over the sea of people, trying to find the woman. "There seems to be a lot of those."
"Too late to change my past now, but if I could, I would."

Alexis gave him a disbelieving smirk. "Are you saying, if you could have changed things, you would've waited for me?"

He gave her his wicked grin. "I'm saying I would have found you sooner. — Sarah Curtis

The people trying to change others can conveniently be termed the angry, while the people trying to change themselves might be called the guilty, although it would be just as descriptive to speak of the controlling and the dependent, or the paranoid and the repressive, or, inelegantly, the screamers and the criers. In some circles, attaching labels to people rates only a little higher than chicken stealing, because ... a label immediately ends attempts to understand the individual. — Jo Coudert

Marlowe grinned. That so? I couldn't disagree more. Is that Nietzsche talking? Ah, the Germans. We have a factory in Germany, you know. Actually, Germany is a fine example, so let's take Germany: They were crushed in the Great War. Their debt was staggering. A pound of bread cost nearly three billion Marks! The Reichsmark was practically worthless - you'd have better luck papering your house with it than trying to buy goods or pay your bills. But Marlowe Industries is going to help them get on their feet. We're going to change the world. — Libba Bray

I stopped trying to chase the perfect place to be, and realized the perfect place is with your loved ones and your closest friends, around the dinner table, over a good meal, talking about the past year and the year to come and things that you want to change in your life. You hear their stories and talk about things you'd like to see happen in the world. That's what we do. — Hilary Swank

It's difficult to stop trying with the one you love. You always hope that this next time might work, might change everything for the better. — Donna Freitas

But beauty is about finding the right fit, the most natural fit, To be perfect, you have to feel perfect about yourself
avoid trying to be something you're not. For a goddess, that's especially hard. We can change so easily.
-Aphrodite — Rick Riordan

If you try desperately to hang on to something that used to be a success for you, it's going to go away. You have to change. — George Clooney

I am a supporter of much of the Arab Spring, as a matter of indigenous self-determination. So, I see the United States' role in Libya as an appropriately restrained one in providing some international support for the work of those trying to bring democratic change against a regime that has undoubtedly been dictatorial, particularly in the past twenty years. — Melissa Harris-Perry

I am slightly fascinated by the question of whether humanity is capable of change. I may have come to the conclusion that we're not, but we keep trying. — Laura Marling

I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

We spend our youth attempting to change the future, he explained, and the rest of our lives trying to preserve the past. — Christopher Fowler

He remembered the moment when his thoughts had inverted themselves - that shift from not being able to please everyone to not trying - and the way that change had enabled him to see past the maneuverings and histrionics of the representatives to the deeper structures of the problem; it was the same with the Corazhas. — Katherine Addison

I try my best to learn from other people's mistakes. I have a lot of respect for people who can change. — Mike Tyson

I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been ... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible. — Dorothy Allison

Forgive yourself, for anything and everything. This includes things you did as an adult and way back to things you have done since you were born. You can't change the past, so let it go and move on. You won't really have peace in general until you make peace with yourself. You need to generally like yourself and get along with yourself, because you will always be there. You can't get away from yourself. Wherever you go, there you are. So become your own friend, then you will have peace inside of yourself. God, the perfect and holy one, even gives you grace; so give yourself grace. You never have been and never will be perfect. So get over trying to be. Amen — Lisa Bedrick

Simply put, this is one insight we heard echoed by tens of thousands of great managers:
People don't change that much.
Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out.
Try to draw out what was left in.
That is hard enough. — Marcus Buckingham

When you realize that you live in, that indeed you are this moment now, and no other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and taste to the full, whether it be pleasure or pain. At once it becomes obvious why this universe exists, why conscious beings have been produced, why sensitive organs, why space, time, and change. The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly. Obviously, it all exists for this moment.

It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell. — Alan W. Watts

This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours. — Douglas Coupland

I can't change the past, but I can try to make a better future for me ... — Ozzy Osbourne

Vonnegut was talking," I say today, "about the psychic effects of trauma." There's a sentence of Alice Miller's looping in my mind, about grandiose people and depressives, Narcissus and Echo: "Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact." It's the main thing I've learned from reading all this psychology: the future is always trying to feel like the past. When it does, it feels like selfishness, hurt, loss at the hands of others. The trick is to let it empty. Maybe this is another way to come unstuck in time. — Kristin Dombek

Peeking in the rearview mirror as she pulled away, she saw that Dawson was still standing where she'd left him, as if hoping she'd change her mind and turn the car around. She felt the stirrings of something dangerous, something she'd been trying to deny. He still loved her, she was certain of that now, and the realization was intoxicating. She knew it was wrong, and she tried to force the feeling away, but Dawson and their past had taken root once more, and she could no longer deny the simple truth that for the first time in years, she'd felt like she'd finally come home. — Nicholas Sparks

This will be a week that I change your sheets! Don't try to rest the same way you've rested in the past, for I AM remaking your bed to rest in. Know that I AM causing your house to be reordered and redirecting your steps. And because your bed is being made, stay focused and up with Me, until the breakthrough is seen in your life. — Chuck Pierce

Many try to force the past to change. — Mason Cooley

A belief is only a thought you continue to think. A belief is nothing more than a chronic pattern of thought, and you have the ability - if you try even a little bit - to begin a new pattern, to tell a new story, to achieve a different vibration, to change your point of attraction. — Esther Hicks

This is a living planet. Look around. Mars, Venus, Jupiter. Look beyond our solar system. Where else is there a place that works, that is just right for the likes of us? It has not happened just instantly. It is vulnerable to our actions. But it's the result of four and a half billion years of evolution, of change over time. And it changes every day, all the time. It would be in our interest to try to maintain a certain level of stability that has enabled us to prosper, to not wreck the very systems that give us life. — Sylvia Earle

A lot of times we set ourselves up to fail. It's interesting. A lot of times the resolutions we choose are the ones, like you said in the opening, we keep breaking over and over again. Sometimes it reflects parts of ourselves that we really need to accept instead of trying to change. — Cheryl Richardson

I wouldn't say that I'm actually trying to cause chills in the audience, but certainly my goal is to, at the very least, effect a physiological response - at the most, to effect some sort of state change, ideally, in the audience. — Eric Whitacre

It's a girl thing, trying to change ourselves as if we can change our lives too. — Cherise Sinclair

Sometimes in love it just gets to the point where I have to give up. I have to give up trying and I have to give up believing because I know things won't change. To me, giving up isn't being weak. Giving up is being strong enough to let go. — Taylor Swift

I necessarily fear change except that it's so seldom for the better. It's just that I can live with any number of things going straight to hell as long as these streams continue to hold up. If this amounts to living in a fool's paradise, don't waste your time trying to explain that to the fool. — John Gierach

So many of us get caught up into the race game that we forget that in the end we are just people trying to do better for ourselves and our families. My father use to have a saying, that in order to be great you have to do great things that change the world of people around you. — D.E. Rogers

I'm not going to get into a debate over the non-essentials. I won't try to change other denominations. Why be divisive? — Rick Warren

If you're a salesman, you have to deal with yourself the way you are. Not how you'd like to be.
If you don't have what it takes, you can waste a lot of time asking yourself "How can I get what it takes?" The question you should be asking yourself is, "Is there something else that takes what I have to offer?" Because if there's something you can succeed at, just the way you are, you won't have to waste a lot of time trying to change yourself. Which you're never going to be able to do, anyway. — Helen DeWitt

Without living, there will be no learning. Without learning, there will be no growth. Without growth, there will be no change. The only way you learn is by trying. You may make mistakes but you have to remember that doing so will lead to change. Be willing to learn from experiences, grow and live to become better not bitter. — Kemi Sogunle

Em, I am trying to have an important conversation!" shouted Seylin. "I will not change into a cat! — Clare B. Dunkle

To feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the harborless without also trying to change the social order so that people can feed, clothe and shelter themselves is just to apply palliatives. It is to show a lack of faith in one's fellows, their responsibilitie s as children of God, heirs of heaven. — Dorothy Day

This is the ultimate war of ideas. You're trying to get somebody to change their mind about conservatism, because that's exactly what we're fighting out there. We're fighting an insanely fundamentalist mentality that relies on taking certain things absolutely literally, and they're people on both sides of the conflict doing that. Even now, some people still take the Bible literally, and those are the ones wanting to fight a war against Islam. — Immortal Technique

Our personal journey is rarely easy, and our global journey is even less so. Because everything is interdependent, we have to work on both of these levels at once. Trying to change society without deeply understanding our heartmind won't work. Your own road home can never be separated from society's journey. We need a unifying theory and language that allow us to link the lessons of our personal journey with the situation facing our world. The important question then, a question laced with a gorgeous irony, is, "How do we get home from here?" Or, maybe more appropriate, "How do we get here from here? — Ethan Nichtern

This is life. Our bodies change. Our minds change. Our hearts change. Things are always evolving. I hope we can be supportive of each other and try to really have each other's backs, especially when we don't know the whole story. — Emma Stone

The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That's the ground, that's what we study, that's what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest. — Pema Chodron

Percy: I'll walk down to the cabins and Connor and Travis are stealing stuff from the camp store, and Silena is arguing with Annabeth trying to give her a new makeover, and Clarisse is still sticking the new kids' head into the toilets. It's nice that some things never change. — Rick Riordan

You didn't like him, did you, Dad?"
"It wasn't that I didn't like him," my dad says slowly. "It was just that he lives in a completely different world, and I worried that he didn't really approve of you the way you are, that he was trying to change you into something else."
God, I never realized my dad was that perceptive..
"You see, the thing is," he says after we've both sat for a while in the sunshine, "the thing is that love is really the most important thing. I know it's hard for you to see it now" - he chuckles quietly- "but when I first laid eyes on your mother I thought she was fantastic, and I've never stopped loving her, not for a second. Oh yes, we've had our rough patches, and she can be a bit of an old battle-ax at times, but I still love her. That in-love feeling at the beginning settles down into a different, familiar sort of love, but it has to be there right from the start, otherwise it just won't work. — Jane Green

If you do not want what I want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong. Or if my beliefs are different from yours, at least pause before you set out to correct them. Or if my emotion seems less or more intense than yours, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel other than I do. Or if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, please let me be. I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up trying to change me into a copy of you. — David Keirsey

On the other hand, we don't come to work with all of these social goals, nor are we directly trying to change the world and all of that. Our job is that we have these human characters, and it's our responsibility to play them truthfully and as human as possible. Jill has cast this impeccably. These actors nail it, even the non-Pfeffermans. It's ridiculous. — Jeffrey Tambor

When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself
that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control (p.82-83) — Geneen Roth

I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground, unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way. — Elizabeth Gilbert

You're trying to tell me that everything you've done is for a good cause. You think that all this killing is worth it because of the results. I'm not sure I agree. Lots of people work for charity; lots of people want to change the world. But they don't have to behave like you. — Anthony Horowitz

When I started the diamond business, no black person, period, was in it to do what we're trying to do to change the industry. So I like to do things that I see clearly that are in my, you know, scope. And then, I had to figure how I get talented or smart business people around me to execute. That's what I have to do. — Russell Simmons

Open your mind a little, don't believe everything you hear, see or read, the world is so caught up in trying to avoid the topics that matter that you'll lose yourself trying to become like it. — Nikki Rowe

The reason I like incorporating the Yakuza into my movies - all their actions, everything they do, you can say 'It's ok because he's a Yakuza'. Changes happen very quickly in their world. If you were trying to make a movie about politicians, it would takes years and years for something to change; whereas for Yakuzas, it could only take one night and things can change dramatically. — Takashi Miike

If I were to give off-the-cuff advice to anyone trying to institute change, I would say, "How clear is the metaphor?" — Warren G. Bennis