Quotes About Transformation

once can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales.

But very often (too often, to my taste) I have been photographed and knew it. Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of posing. I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (...).

A man who wants the truth is never answered save in strong, highly colored images, which nonetheless turn ambiguous, indecisive, once he tries to transform them into signs, as in any manticism, the consulting lover must make his own truth

In his later years, William traded in his Baptist upbringing for a more epicurean life.

Archbold scandal pushed him toward his proper career: that of a full-time philanthropist.

Tens of thousands of onlookers gaped in amazement as the shattered British troops marched out of Yorktown and, to the tune of an old English ballad, "The World Turned Upside Down

The sum total of these developments resulted in nothing less than a revolution in medical education.

What nobody could have foreseen in 1913 was that

By early 1873, he had crossed his own Rubicon and never looked back.

The whole dismal parade of career hacks and self-promoting political generals on the Union side had been weeded out, giving way to a new fighting breed.

John's moustache began to fall out, and all the hair on his body had followed by August.

He seemed to age a generation.

It took Rockefeller time to shed his obsessive concern for Standard Oil and allow himself to be lulled by the restful sea spirit.

Then, overnight, the alopecia seemed to equalize their ages.

I reflected that, when dynamic, positive change happens, it is usually because of generational commitment to social transformation.

The security state that has grown up since 9/11 has transformed our culture; and yes, we have needed the protection. We are often reminded that we must "never forget" what happened on that fateful day. But if we fail to keep in mind the country we were before 9/11, we may never steer in that direction again. In that case, the terrorists really will have won.

Perhaps the generation that will genuinely transform the Arab world has not yet arrived.

The example of this poor, dark-skinned man who turned the empire upside-down made a deep impression on the young Sadat. "I began to imitate him," he writes. "I took off all my clothes, covered myself from the waist down with an apron, made myself a spindle, and withdrew to a solitary nook on the roof of our house in Cairo.

The incredible women around the world who do stand up for justice can in fact transform the planet.

She carried the burn of the sun on her body. It was for all of those wasted, dull years.

Stanislavsky wrote that the difficult will become easy and the easy habitual, so that the habitual my become beautiful. (P224)

I had to decide how to use that pressure. I had to decide whether it was going to crush me or turn me into a diamond.

I felt like someone else. I felt like a normal person. But I got over it.

I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night. I felt like I was standing on a shore, watching small receding shapes on the horizon. I felt like I had been speaking English, and now I realized everyone else had been speaking a different language entirely. The world was changing. And I didn't want it to.