Life & Wisdom Quote by William Arthur Ward

Ward’s line sells change the way a greeting card sells weather: as something we can’t control, only reinterpret. The sunshine comparison is doing more than prettifying the abstract. Sunshine is universally recognizable, physically felt, and morally neutral. It nourishes crops and causes drought; it warms skin and burns it. By hitching “change” to that image, Ward smuggles in a practical message: outcomes are contingent, and our judgment of them is often retrospective. What looked like “dawn” in the moment can read as “dusk” later, and vice versa.

The paired opposites - friend/foe, blessing/curse, dawn/dusk - aren’t just rhetorical symmetry. They stage the mind’s habitual binary thinking, then quietly undermine it. Change isn’t one thing; it’s a force that reveals our positioning. If you’re shaded, sunshine is relief; if you’re exposed, it’s threat. The subtext is almost managerial: don’t romanticize disruption, don’t demonize it either. Locate yourself relative to it.

Context matters here: Ward was a mid-20th-century American motivational writer, a genre that thrived on tidy metaphors during decades defined by rapid modernization, corporate culture, and Cold War anxiety. The quote reads like a tool for coping with volatility without naming its sources. It offers a calming frame, not a diagnosis: you can’t stop the sun, but you can decide whether you need shade, sunscreen, or a longer walk.