Quotes About Transformation

Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.

Reflection is not the evil; but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.

for our times are not satisfied with faith and not even with the miracle of changing water into wine - they 'go right on,' changing wine into water.

Just as gold is purified in the fire, so the soul is purified in sufferings.

The only fundamental basis for understanding is that one himself becomes what he understands and one understands only in proportion to becoming himself that which he understands.

Only the lower natures forget themselves and become something new. For instance, the butterfly has entirely forgotten that it was a caterpillar; perhaps in turn it can forget that it was a butterfly so completely that it can become a fish. The

the Christianity of Christendom, takes this into account; it takes away from Christianity the offense, the paradox, etc., and instead of that introduces, probability, the plainly comprehensible. That is, it transforms Christianity into something entirely different from what it is in the New Testament, yea, into exactly the opposite; and this is the Christianity of Christendom, of us men.

As the Good itself is only one thing, so it alone wishes to be what helps us along. But the Good is not something external to us, like a slave who comes against his will when the master uses the whip. The place and the path are within each of us. And just as the place is the blessed state of the striving soul, so the path is the striving soul's continual transformation.

Christianity is incendiarism; Christ Himself says, 'I am come to set fire on the earth'…official Christianity is not the Christianity of the New Testament.

God can turn any negative of life into a positive. If life takes us into the minus of negative experiences, heaven sends down a vertical line to intersect it and make all things positive. Let

We had to become other than we were, or cease to be at all

Is it true we'd rather be ruined than changed?

Dying never made a man better than he was when he was living.

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.

What you were is forever who you are.

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.

Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become . . . That is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's done .

To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh?

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language...

When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far.

How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance. Or, not very far at all, because they rose from one great city, fell to another. The distance between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space.

Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom.