Quotes About Transformation

Solitude is the furnace in which transformation takes place.

But still – that is our vocation: to convert the hostis into a hospes, the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.

The spiritual life is a gift. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit, who lifts us up into the kingdom of God's love. But to say that being lifted up into the kingdom of love is a divine gift does not mean that we wait passively until the gift is offered to us.

Spiritual formation is not about steps or stages on the way to perfection. It's about the movements from the mind to the heart through prayer in its many forms that reunite us with God, each other, and our truest selves.

The years that lie behind you, with all their struggles and pains, will in time be remembered only as the way that led you to your new life.

Our cup is often so full of pain that joy seems completely unreachable. When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.

One of the most beautiful things is that when we let the enemy go out of our heart by love and forgiveness, we are suddenly free to let that unlimited, all-embracing love of God pour into us. We become a new person every time we forgive an enemy, because we let go of the angry person inside who was holding on to fear.

The profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that permanently warp the mind.

All that had gone before was useless, and some of it was worse.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.

Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted or enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him every day by day, and the divine being established.

The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.

Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream-world into a reality.

They say that characters were engraven on the bathtub of king Tching-thang to this effect: 'renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.' I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

The seasons and all their changes are in me.

If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.

What is man but a mass of thawing clay?