Quotes About Transformation

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody's in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson's and Chapters.

Yoga does not just change the way we see things, it transforms the person who sees.

There is no progress toward ultimate freedom without transformation, and this is the key issue in all lives.

Change we need

Change is never easy, but always possible.

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it's been done in America for 221 years -- block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.

this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal ...~~Barack Obama upon winning the Democratic nomination for presidency conveys his thinking of what that means ....for the world, Tuesday, JUNE 03, 2008

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

perhaps that's how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we're lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer.

When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he'd expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry.

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America."b

the worlds that they thought they'd left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

We must lift ourselves up, dust ourselfs off and begin the work of remaking America.

If people can learn to hate they can learn to love.

about had made American life a hell of a lot better.

They both disturbed and comforted me, those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another—the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that's gone on before.

Part of what's so powerful about this performance is it reminds us of the vital, crazy, kinetic energy that's at the heart of America--that people who have a vision and a set of ideals can transform the world., Every single step of progress that we've made has been based on this notion that people can come together, and ideas can move like electricity though them, and a world can change

Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads.

I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that's important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way (wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond any subsequent disappointments, to retrieve that thing that you once, ever so briefly, held in your hand. That bus ride kept me going, I think. Maybe it still does.

History travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history can travel sideways.

I didn't feel that I deserved to be in the company of the transformative figures who'd been given the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, I saw the prize as a call to action.