Quotes About Transformation

We look at a picture throughout our lives, we listen to a piece of music throughout our lives, we read a book time and again throughout our lives, as we should do—especially the scriptures—and it is different each time. Something else comes in. We see something else there that we never saw before, because we are a different person each time we experience a work of art.

To Wilson, however, it would be worth the sacrifice. By entering the war, America was also transforming the conflict from a competition for empire and national interests into a crusade to make the world safe for democracy and to secure mankind's hopes for future peace.

With Saint Augustine, we come to the end of the road as far as the Greco-Roman world is concerned.

He ripped aside the veil of respectability with which the ancients had clothed their traditional gods and goddesses and exposed the sordid reality underneath. What Socrates and Plato had started, the overthrow of the pagan pantheon, Origen's Christianity finished.

A new concept had entered the modern consciousness. The idea of power not in a political sense, the ability to command people, but the ability to command nature: the power to alter and use it to create something new, and produce it in greater and larger quantities than ever before.

Instead of stability, Heraclitus said, there is only change: ceaseless, relentless, and without end. In the desperate watercourse of existence, any notion we have of permanent or fixed values, even of our own body, is pure illusion. Instead, everywhere we look, everything we see is in constant flux and change.

We watch the boy grow into a young man and then grow old and die, but it is still the same man.

Ik weet niets van alchemie, maar ik zeg dit: zij zijn op de verkeerde weg. Het tastbare laat zich alleen door het ontastbare vormen. De werkelijkheid laat zich door niets veranderen dan door de geest. Om de dingen anders te maken hoef je ze niet aan te raken, je moet ze alleen anders zien.

Today, the forces of competition, technology, and globalization have converged to spur innovation and to transform the way business is done in the securities industry.

ET DIABOLUS INCARNATE EST. ET HOMO FACTUS EST. ?

The adept could, in truth, change those who were obnoxious to him into harmless and unimportant shapes, not as in the letter of the old stories, by transforming the enemy, but by transforming himself. The magician puts men below him by going up higher, as one looks down on a mountain city from a loftier crag.

And there were other rocks that were like animals, creeping, horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and others were like words I could not say, and others like dead people lying on the grass. I went on among them, though they frightened me, and my heart was full of wicked song they put into it; and I wanted to make faces and twist myself about the way they did, and I went on and on a long way till at last I liked the rocks and they didn't frighten me any more

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

A man can't go out the way he came in… a man has got to add up to something!

Once, as a teenager, I had believed that people could change themselves. Finally I realized that all one could ever hope was understanding one's filthy self better.

How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something

Baptism enslaved me.

Old poetics played a large part in my alchemy of the word.

The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.

I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.

The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.

Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, rejuvenate oneself through cruelty?

Cela s'est passé. Je sais aujourd'hui saluer la beauté.

À moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies. - Une saison en enfer