No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.
All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Change doesn't always lead to improvement, just as not all progress is beneficial.
This quote by Ellen Glasgow emphasizes the distinction between mere change and meaningful growth. It suggests that while change is a constant in life, not every change results in progress or positive development; some changes can be regressive or detrimental, just like movement that doesnβt necessarily lead us toward our goals. The quote invites individuals to reflect on the nature of changes in their lives and to evaluate whether those changes serve their interests and aspirations.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used when discussing the importance of evaluating personal growth during a life transition.
More from Ellen Glasgow
All quotes βSpring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces.
In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.
The things I feared were not in the sky, but in the nature and in the touch of humanity. The cruelty of children . . . the blindness of the unpitiful - these were my terrors. But not the crash of thunder overhead, not the bolts of fire from the clouds.
He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.
Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.
Similar quotes
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no - not just to the date rapist or overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself. We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.
Everyone needs a chance to evolve.
One mighty deed can change the course of things; a lonely thought becomes omnipotent.
A revolution resembles the death of a fading star, an exhilarating Technicolor explosion that gives way not to an ordered new galaxy but to a nebula, a formless cloud of shifting energy.
Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.