Quotes About Transformation

There are no birds in last year's nest

Nothing that is can pause or stay; The moon will wax, the moon will wane, The mist and cloud will turn to rain, The rain to mist and cloud again, Tomorrow be today.

Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.

Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains, as no artist could ever do!

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

I pray on the principle that wine knocks the cork out of a bottle. There is an inward fermentation, and there must be a vent.

We are always on the anvil by trials God is shaping us for higher things.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Repentance is another name for aspiration.

Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.

The old self must die. He had always known it, but had so seldom acted it. He felt strangely glad that he was at the front. It was the only life; the only death.

Lay me down like a stone oh God, and raise me up like a new bread".

There was no deceiving himself: something terrible, new, and more important than anything before in his life, was taking place within him of which he alone was aware.

How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself

She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. [...] He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.

I do not live my own life, there is something stronger than me which directs me. I suffer; but formerly I was dead and only now do I live.

Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life.

He suddenly felt that the very thing that had once been the source of his suffering had become the source of his spiritual joy, that what had seemed insoluble when he condemned, reproached and hated, became simple and clear when he forgave and loved.

He was much changed and grown even thinner since Pyotr Ivanovich had last seen him, but, as is always the case with the dead, his face was handsomer and above all more dignified than than when he was alive.

When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change.

Disruptive movement must come from within.

Let me lie down, Lord, like a stone; let me rise up like new bread.

He had but to call to mind what he had been three months before and what he was now. To call to mind with what regularity he had been going downhill for every possibility of hope to be shattered.

Man is flowing. In him there are all possibilities: he was stupid, now he is clever; he was evil, now he is good, and the other way around. In this is the greatness of man.