Quotes About Transformation

So often we try to alter circumstances to suit ourselves, instead of letting them alter us.

Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and at last some crisis shows what we have become.

I didn't know I'd have to be torn down before I could be built up.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

A diamond is a chunk of coal that made good under pressure.

A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.

I think the years I have spent in prison have been the most formative and important in my life because of the discipline, the sensations, but chiefly the opportunity to think clearly, to try to understand things.

Sorrow has its reward. It never leaves us where it found us.

Sweet are the uses of adversity; Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have moldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

He had come to that time in his life (it varies for every man) when a human being gives himself over to his demon or to his genius, according to a mysterious law which orders him either to destroy or to surpass himself.

The United States was born in the country and moved to the city in the nineteenth century.

New York is notoriously inhospitable to the past, disowning it whenever it can.

Life is rich, always changing, always challenging, and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood, concrete, glass and steel, of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space.

When a dove begins to associate with crows its feathers remain white but its heart grows black.

It is the beginning of the end.

Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

Cost little less than new before they're ended.

The whole history of the Canadian north can be divided into two periods - before and after the aeroplane.

Much will have to change in Canada if the country is to stay the same.

Pounds are the sons, not of pounds, but of pence.

All things are subject to change, and we change with them. (Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.)

If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. (Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.)