Daily Inspiration Quote by Alphonse Karr

Change, Karr reminds us, is often just a costume change. "The more things change, the more they are the same" lands with the clipped fatalism of a 19th-century critic who has watched revolutions, fashions, regimes, and grand reforms cycle through Paris like weather. It works because it punctures the self-congratulating story modernity loves to tell about itself: that newness equals progress, and motion equals meaning.

Karr's intent is less to deny transformation than to demote it. He frames change as surface-level churn that leaves underlying incentives intact: the powerful rebrand, the public adapts, the press moves on, and the basic human repertoire (vanity, greed, fear, hope) keeps writing the plot. As a critic, he is trained to spot patterns beneath performance. The line is a scalpel aimed at the era's rhetoric of novelty, whether political (post-1789 France's recurring upheavals) or cultural (the fetish for the latest salon idea, the newest moral panic, the freshest aesthetic). It suggests that history doesn't so much advance as it rehearses.

The subtext carries a sting: if sameness persists, it's not because people are incapable of change, but because institutions and appetites are remarkably good at absorbing it. The phrase is memorable because its symmetry mimics the trap it describes. You feel the loop. That neat circularity is the point: progress, Karr implies, can be real, but it is rarely as revolutionary as it advertises.