Changing Lives Quotes

You have gifts to share. When used well, creativity isn't just about you. It's about what you have to give. It's about leaving a mark, changing lives, and sparking a legacy that others can pass on. ~ Ed Cyzewski

You can laugh at Christianity; you can mock and ridicule it. But it works. It changes lives. If you trust Christ, start watching your attitudes and actions, because Jesus Christ is in the business of changing lives. ~ Josh McDowell

I'm not in the speech making business. I'm not in the seminar business. I'm not in the writing book business. I'm in the changing lives business. ~ Zig Ziglar

The best initiative and passion is to change lives,great intellectual property is changing lives all over the world. ~ Anyaele Sam Chiyson

Influence is not about what you can do but how you use it to change the lives of others ~ Sunday Adelaja

Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn't trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he'd been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill.
I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class...
"Stories aren't real," he told me shortly. "They don't feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding 'family' in the nearest gang."
Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. "Write down the names of some books," she said. "Maybe we'll read them."
I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young live ~ Terri Windling

Real writing is about changing lives for eternity rather than entertaining a life for a moment. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

It's really special to be a part of something that's really changing lives. ~ Debby Ryan

changing lives started with changing my own. ~ Alexandra Elle

I've often said that we are doing something far more important than just selling cosmetics; we are changing lives. ~ Mary Kay Ash

Because your life is a reflection of your inner Self, causality comes exclusively in changing your own nature, not trying to change the external world out there by manipulating it. ~ Thomas Daniel Nehrer

I thought of Atargatis, the First, frightening and beautiful. The mermaid goddess who lived on in the soul of every woman who'd ever fallen in love with the ocean.

I thought of Sebastian, my little mermaid queen, how happy he was the day of the parade, just getting the chance to express himself, to be himself.

I thought of Vanessa, the story about how she and her girlfriends became feminist killjoys to get a women's literature core in their school, the way she'd accepted me this summer without question, gently pushed me out of my self-imposed shell. Of her mother, Mrs. James, how she'd grabbed that bullhorn at the parade and paved the way for Sebastian's joy.

I thought of Lemon, so wise, so comfortable in her own skin, full of enough love to raise a daughter as a single mom and still have room for me, for her friends, for everyone whose lives she touched with her art.

I thought of Kirby, her fierce loyalty, her patience and grace, her energy, what a good friend and sister she'd become, even when I'd tried to shut her out. I thought of all the new things I wanted to share with her now, all the things I hoped she'd share with me.

I thought of my mother, a woman I'd never known, but one whose ultimate sacrifice gave me life.

I thought of Granna, stepping in to raise her six granddaughters when my mom died, never once making us feel like a burden or a curse. She'd managed the cocoa estate with her son, personally s ~ Sarah Ockler

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Are you on the eve of change? Embrace it. Accept it. Don't resist it. Change is not only a part of life, change is a necessary part of God's strategy. To use us to change the world, he alters our assignments. ~ Max Lucado

Consistency can be a trap, especially if it leads to being consistently wrong rather than to stopping, admitting your mistake, and changing course. ~ Jane Fonda

I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love. ~ John Cage

Everything is not black-and-white. I'm really interested in the gray area - not justifying it, not glorifying it, not condoning it, but at least having people see there's a genesis for every event in our lives. There's some divine order to it, whether it's ugly or beautiful. ~ Isaiah Washington

People in AA are generally too fundamentally broken to see that they've turned their lives over to an empty concept and a failed ideal," he ~ Stephen King

In our lives are special moments that live as their own, the rest is movement with the passage of time. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

God, today I give you my children. I ask that you watch over them and keep them from harm, and that you will pursue their hearts. Jesus, meet my children today. Show them your love, your mercy, and sing your love song over their lives. Where I can't meet their needs, I know that you do. Thank you for loving them more than I could ever imagine, and thank you for holding their lives in your hands. Amen. ~ Whitney Meade

I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room. ~ May Sarton

The problem is that too many adults think their kids' lives are simple, or they try to make their lives simple, when their emotional lives are just as complicated as ours. They might have a few less tools to deal with it because they're young, but the emotions are all the same, and the subject matter is all the same. ~ Sherman Alexie

The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper. ~ Michael Moore

The antidote to a meaningless and lawless existence was provided by humanism, a revolutionary new creed that conquered the world during the last few centuries. The humanist religion worships humanity, and expects humanity to play the part that God played in Christianity and Islam, and that the laws of nature played in Buddhism and Daoism. Whereas traditionally the great cosmic plan gave meaning to the life of humans, humanism reverses the roles and expects the experiences of humans to give meaning to the cosmos. According to humanism, humans must draw from within their inner experiences not only the meaning of their own lives, but also the meaning of the entire universe. This is the primary commandment humanism has given us: create meaning for a meaningless world. Accordingly, ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Nevertheless, it is the Christian theory that it is only a regard for this Being -- partly a trembling fear and partly a kind of conciliation represented to be love -- that keeps the human race from roaring downhill to villainy and disaster. Nor are theologians daunted by the obvious fact that many open and even ribald skeptics are not going that way, but, on the contrary, show a considerably higher degree of virtue than the Christian average. Their answer ... is that the moral sense of every such blameless candidate for Hell 'is a kind of parasitic growth upon the otherworldliness of the society in which he lives.' ... Even men who should know better indulge in this confusion between the religious impulse and common decency. ... But this is surely going beyond the plain facts. A man may be truly religious without imagining God as good at all, and he may be good without believing that there is any moral order in the universe or even that God exists. Religion does not necessarily make men better citizens, whether of their neighborhoods or of the world. ~ H.L. Mencken

Here's the thing: the act of reading changes your life, sometimes in large ways, sometimes in small ways, but every book you read asks you to move outside of yourself and your own experience to consider the lives of others. So I can't identify a particular book that altered my life, but I do know that the act of reading has pushed me to engage more deeply with the world (real and imagined), and I'm grateful for that. ~ Ethan Rutherford

while your mother in law still lives, domestic harmony / is out of the question. ~ Juvenal

The dignity we seek in dying is not to be found in our final weeks, days or moments but in the way we live and how we are seen by those people whose lives we affect. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

Changing the legal standard creates a slippery slope ... plural marriage. The court opened up a pandora's box by doing that. ~ Rick Santorum

In our lives in a lot of ways it's all about fake. You've got people wanting things for fake reasons. ~ Billy Corgan

For all the people in the world who would die to have this power, kill to have it, I can't persuade the two people whose lives actually matter to me to take it. And I can't force it upon them. That is my sorrow. ~ Deborah Bryan

We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another. ~ Lauren Oliver

I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect Union, one and inseparable, established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies. ~ William Tyler

God never closes one door in our lives without opening a new one. Many times it's a much better road for us behind that new door, if we just trust in his love for us and take the new path. ~ Heather McBride

I always envision a care free, charismatic, lives by her own rules type of woman who has the world at her finger tips. I don't think she's necessarily guarded or unapproachable but she has the quality that summons her on level of her own that most don't feel worthy of and wouldn't attempt. Stevie's sort of laying this out and saying here I am, this is me, can you fly with me? Are you up to the challenge? I won't hurt you but can you handle this? ~ ~ Anonymous ~

If Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great were brought back to life today, they would believe themselves in the country of the gods and not of men. Ten lives would not suffice Aristotle to assimilate all the knowledge that has been accumulated on earth since his death, and Alexander would perhaps be able to realize his dream and conquer the world. ~ Lev Shestov

We cannot forget those we love. They shape our lives for ever, by their absence as much as by their presence. ~ Romesh Gunesekera

The craziest thing I've done is cut my hair blonde and short a couple of years ago. And people reached out to me saying, 'Celine, you're one of the most stable things we have in our lives, don't do that. We want you the way you are.' ~ Celine Dion

It was crazy, what young people believed was possible, what so many earnest twenty-three-year-olds took for granted about the rest of their lives. ~ Emma Straub

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together. ~ Noel Coward