Quotes About Transformation

True repentance will entirely change you; the bias of your souls will be changed, then you will delight in God, in Christ, in His Law, and in His people.

The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows.

The work God carries out in us,' he said after a short pause, 'is not often what we expect. A great deal of the time the Holy Spirit seems to be working backward in us and wasting time. If a lump of iron could form an idea of the file that's slowly rough-shaping it, how furious it would be! Yet that's how God shapes us. Certain saints' lives seem horribly monotonous and desolate.

Art is a wound turned into light.

One of the most obvious results of having a baby around the house is to turn two good people into complete idiots who probably wouldn't have been much worse than mere imbeciles without it.

The past grows like a weed.

Sometimes—at the same time—I am a dinosaur, a fish, a bat, a bird, a single-celled organism swimming in the primordial soup, or the embryo of a mammal, sometimes I'm in a cave, sometimes in a womb, which is basically the same thing—a place protected (against time).

Soon after that we would go our separate ways, grow cold, forget one another, the rebels would grow tame as teaching assistants in the universities, the sworn bachelors and party animals would be pushing baby carriages and zoning out in front of their TV, the hippies would get regular haircuts at the local barbershop.

When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me-some of them more than sixty years ago-I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. If the person in the photographs were living in this world today, she would be quite a different person-but it doesn't matter-Stieglitz photographed her then.

Each time I leave here [Ghost Ranch] it is like a Death, and each time that I return it is a Birth.

I realize I must be different than when I came out [to Ghost Ranch], but it seems so long ago that I can't remember what I was like---so I can't lapse back to it---I can only be as I am---and I feel terribly alive---

The idea of using extraordinary force does not mean more of the same effort. Extraordinary action results from out-of-the-box thinking.

The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

It seemed to me, in the gloom, that the flowers had moved closer to her, had crowded eagerly about her bed, as though waiting for her to tell them something. A ravaged old queen, lying in state, surrounded by her whispering court of flowers.

we can suffer economic loss and see it as an opportunity for a spiritual transformation.

Inside us all, in the depths of our winters, things are going on, things we will have no clue of until spring comes, and perhaps not even then.

Regardless of when and how it happens, the dark night of the soul is the transition from bondage to freedom in prayer and in every other aspect of life.

the dark night of the soul is endless.

If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness. It will change your life mightily.

I did not get over the loss of my loved ones; rather, I absorbed the loss into my life, like soil receives decaying matter, until it became a part of who I am.

Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't.

I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.

She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.

She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them and gazed at me. 'I wonder if you know how you have changed. It is the one good, perhaps, to come out of this terrible year. Oh, the spark was clear in you when you first came to me - but you covered your light as if you were afraid of what would happen if anybody saw it. You were like a flame blown by the wind until it is almost extinguished. All I had to do was put the glass around you. And now, how you shine!