Quotes About Transformation

You can laugh at Christianity. You can mock and ridicule it. But it works. If you trust Christ, start watching your attitudes and actions—Jesus Christ is in the business of changing lives.

No revolution that has ever taken place in society can be compared to that which has been produced by the words of Jesus Christ

Knowledge has no significance [...] unless it is transformative.

A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day--nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone's mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part.

Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It's the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable.

Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted for as an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is not a story of transformation but one of integration. Lincoln didn't do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy. The problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.

I took a walk from Friedrichstrasse Station. That appears to be the train station from which I left in 1983 and in 1988. Then, it was a threatening place, with policemen carrying machine guns and parading around with dogs. Today I walked out to a commercial paradise of stores and of—policemen with machine guns and German shepherds. In fact, there were more police now than then.

Redemption is something you have to fight for in a very personal, down-dirty way. Some of our characters lose that, some stray from that, and some regain it.

The thing about changing the world... Once you do it, the world's all different.

Time is what turns kittens into cats.

I leave the world in terrible turmoil. I come back, same turmoil. Nothing at all different. Well, outfits are a little different...

Everything I do in its essence is about helplessness. That's the story I want to tell all the time. It's the story I wanted to live - somebody who appears to be, or is, weak becoming stronger.

I wanted to see everything. It was around the time I acquired language, or even before that time, when something happened that changed my relationship to the spin of the world. My concept of language, of what was possible with music was changed by this revelatory moment. It changed even the way I look at the sun.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame. Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction. Ask for forgiveness. Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

All cultures and peoples turn to poetry during times of celebration, transformation and challenge—those times when ordinary language cannot carry meaning beyond our understanding.

These are the ice horses, horses who entered through your head, and then your heart, your beaten heart. These are the ones who loved you. They are the horses who have held you so close that you have become a part of them, an ice horse galloping into fire.

Emerging from a story, a poem, the Earth, a time in history, or from the body of our mothers is sometimes explosive, chaotic, frightening, yet always awe-inspiring and humbling. We can use the energy to create fresh structures, or we can destroy or be destroyed. The energy can have power over us or empower us, and even what is destructive might clear the debris so that fresh life can emerge from embers or ashes.

I lay my body down in another city, another hotel room. Once Louis Armstrong and his band stayed here. Later the hotel fell to trash. New money resurrected it. Under the red moon of justice, I dream with the king of jazz.

Some will not see them. But some will see the horses with their hearts of sleeping volcanoes and will be rocked awake past their bodies to see who they have become.

I was anything but history. I was the wind.

The door to the mind should only open from the heart. An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

What we haven't imagined will one day spit us out magnificent and simple. -Fury of Rain

What we haven't imagined will one day spit us out magnificent and simple.

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.