All of those things - rock and men and river - resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one, and the line from inorganic to organic and back is uninterrupted and unbroken. William Least HeatMoon
About This Quote

This quote from Ernest G. Born was written in 1949 and is a good example of the use of the idea of resistance to change. Born was an American Abstract Expressionist Painter, but he also spent time studying Zen Buddhism, and Buddhism influenced his work. This particular quote comes from a book of poetry called “The White Tower” and if you read it all the way through you can see how this concept is interwoven into the poem.

The idea that nature resists change and that we should not be surprised that we cannot change things we do not understand or appreciate is very interesting. When we try and force something to change it only causes conflict and resistance, and we should instead accept things as they are.

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More Quotes By William Least HeatMoon
  1. I notice you use 'work' and 'job' interchangeably. oughten to do that. A job's what you force yourself to pay attention to for money. With work, you don't have to force yourself. (Man dining at Claudia Sanders Dinner House)
  2. All of those things - rock and men and river - resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to...
  3. With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.
  4. Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.
  5. Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.' The uncluttered stretches of the American West and...
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