Quotes About Transformation

We have nothing less to do than to get inside of whole peoples and change their motives and dispositions.

My father lost a lung in a chemical accident at General Motors, and after a while, he got a settlement that sort of changed all of our lives and moved us from, what we say, 'ashy to classy' in some aspects.

The sense of national emergency engendered by war transforms the destruction of dissident opinion into patriotism.

To lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have for greater life; to leave the friends you loved for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth----

I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then?

out of death, life, out of the coarse rank earth, a flower.

Athenians having made up their minds to abandon their city, broke up their homes, threw themselves into their ships, and became a naval people.

Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side…. Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you've died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now. —RUMI

It was his wedding day, and then it was any day; it was nothing, and then it was forever.

quickly the fear was replaced with rage.

You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in.

In Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? Michael Schrage writes: Successful innovators don't ask customers and clients to do something different; they ask them to become someone different. . . . Successful innovators ask users to embrace—or at least tolerate—new values, new skills, new behaviors, new vocabulary, new ideas, new expectations, and new aspirations. They transform their customers.

No man can step into the same river twice, for the second time it's not the same river, and he's not the same man." —Heraclitus

You can't undo baptism.

People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological.

Please God, whatever I was I am no longer….All is forgotten, if not forgiven—it could have come to that. But I don't trust the thought. I don't know if it's because it would be too easy or too terrible to imagine no one cares anymore.

Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain embedded in the very fabric of the culture.

It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else.

Houses, trees and fields of flax once flourished here. Summers had been blue with flowers. Now it was a shallow sea of stinking grey from end to end. And this is where you fought the war.

Beauty is how objects end. Beauty is death.

None of us ever gets to be in relationship with a finished person. God's redemptive work of change is ongoing in all our lives.

And each of us has tried to be the Holy Spirit in another person's life, trying to work spiritual changes that only God can accomplish.

God will take us where we have not planned to go in order to produce in us what we could not achieve on our own.

We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative[s]," wrote one Bostonian, "and waked up stark mad abolitionists."7