Quotes About Transformation

Perfection is static, and I am in full progress. The faithful wife is only one phase, one moment, one metamorphosis, one condition.

Enter this laboratory of the soul where incidents are refracted into a diary, dissected to prove that every one of us carries a deforming mirror where he sees himself too small or too large, too fat or too thin… Once the deforming mirror is smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness; there is a possibility of joy. —Diary 1, pg. 105

One goes to the magician, as one goes to the analyst, or any quack—to reaffirm one's own secret volitions. Not to be cured, not to be warned, not to be saved, but to become what one wants to be.

What is necessary to life, to livingness, is to move on, in other words to move from one kind of problem to another. Jung has mentioned this. The neurotic is obsessed with one kind of problem. He cannot move on.

He says: "You seem to have finished just suffering life and are beginning to dominate it." Just suffering life is not enough. I know.

Elena) Poderia o amor tornar-se um fogo que não queima, como as chamas dos homens santos da Índia? Estaria ela aprendendo a caminhar de modo mágico sobre carvões em brasa?

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

Becoming is not a contradiction of being but the epiphany of being.

From one point of view becoming is a humiliation, and from another a royal procession.

I had been hired to prepare the mountain for the people instead of the other way around.

Perhaps someday it will be pleasant to remember even this. VIRGIL

Does one ever know what another person is really like, even someone very close to us? Do we know what we are like ourselves? What we are today may not be what we are tomorrow. I

Action is a part of the very reality it transforms, just as the wave is a part of the ocean. The point is not to renounce action, but to act with serenity. Our action will be all the more effective, and all the happier.

Je ne me sens jamais vivre plus intensément que quand je m'échappe à moi-même pour devenir n'importe qui.

Gradation; gradation; and then a sudden leap...

the facts of history all appeared to me like specimens in a herbarium, permanently dried, so that it was easy to forget they had once upon a time been juicy with sap and alive in the sun.

Messieurs, il faut aimer son aigle, l'aimer pour qu'il devienne beau ; car c'est parce qu'il sera beau que vous devez aimer votre aigle...

L'homme se dégagera peu à peu de ce qui le protégeait naguère; de ce qui désormais l'asservit.

A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly

Everything which formerly distressed me is now a delicious pleasure.

Disease had taken hold of Marceline, never again to leave her; it had marked her, stained her. Henceforth she was a thing that had been spoiled.

Si le grain de blé qui est tombé en terre ne meurt, il reste seul ; mais, s'il meurt, il porte beaucoup de fruit. Celui qui aime sa vie la perdra, et celui qui hait sa vie dans ce monde la conservera pour la vie éternelle.

Connais toi-même. Maxime aussi pernicieuse que laide. Quiconque s'observe arrête son développement. La chenille qui chercherait à «bien se connaître» ne deviendrait jamais papillon.