Quotes About Transformation

It is a hard thing to break through a habit, and a yet harder thing to go contrary to our own will. Yet if thou overcome not slight and easy obstacles, how shalt thou overcome greater ones? Withstand thy will at the beginning, and unlearn an evil habit, lest it lead thee little by little into worse difficulties. Oh, if thou knewest what peace to thyself thy holy life should bring to thyself, and what joy to others, methinketh thou wouldst be more zealous for spiritual profit.

It is the grace of Christ, and not the virtue of man, which can and does bring it about that through fervor of spirit frail flesh learns to love and to gain what it naturally hates and shuns.

As iron cast into fire loses its rust and becomes glowing white, so he who turns completely to God is stripped of his sluggishness and changed into a new man. When a man begins to grow lax, he fears a little toil and welcomes external comfort, but when he begins perfectly to conquer himself and to walk bravely in the ways of God, then he thinks those things less difficult which he thought so hard before.

Good comes out of evil.

As often as I have been among men, I have returned home a lesser man.

Know thou of a surety that thou oughtest to lead the life of a dying man. And the more a man dieth to himself, the more he beginneth to live towards God.

Three things make people want to change. One is that they hurt sufficiently.

Repentance is a change of the mind, and regeneration is a change of the man.

Thomas Anderson

Sin is a spiritual illness; thus sinners are in need of salvation.

Obedience unites us so closely to God that it in a way transforms us into Him, so that we have no other will but His. If obedience is lacking, even prayer cannot be pleasing to God.

Whatever is received into something is received according to the condition of the receiver

Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays.... The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms.

What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.

Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn't necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that's that.

The more the soul is conformed to Christ, the more confident it will be of its interest in Christ.

Repentance is the vomit of the soul.

Then he struck her with a magic wand, and she was changed back into a young woman, the fairest ever seen.

An Oriental smile is not an affair of a swift moment. It has a birth and a beginning. It awakes--hesitates--grows, and at last from the sad chrysalis emerges the butterfly.

Revelation is for human salvation, the mending of human brokenness (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 3).

I now understand that I would never have been able to become a plausible critic of the absurdities of modern consciousness until I myself had experienced them. I did not become an orthodox believer or theologian until after I tried out most of the errors long rejected by Christianity. If my first forty years were spent hungering for meaning in life, the last forty have been spent in being fed. If the first forty were prodigal, the last forty have been a homecoming.

Just as God stepped out of his nature to become a partaker of our humanity, so we are called to step out of our nature to become partakers of his divinity" (Hilary of Arles, Intro. Comm. on 2 Pet. 1.4).

In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish." (161)

Big Truth, once understood and assimilated, always modifies your intent, and invariably leads to personal change.