Quotes About Transformation

Progress is impossible without change

The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.

The Qu'ran is God's song, not ours, not even Muhammad's. To allow such a song to pass through one's body, however imperfectly, is to discover that the instrument is transformed by the music.

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.

whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.

When the commonplace We must all die transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness I must die-- and soon, then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

She was one of those women who are never handsome till they are old, and she had had the wisdom to embrace the beauty of age as early as possible.

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.

No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience.

Hans: [Y]ou can't conceive what a great fellow I'm going to be. The seed of immortality has sprouted within me. Deronda: Only a fungoid growth, I daresay - a crowing disease in the lungs.

As the child's mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold, narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into full consciousness.

Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had.

soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.

Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.

character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable.

When the commonplace We must all die tranfors itself suddenly into the acute consciousness I must die - and soon, then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself—that's where it is.

Uno de los secretos en ese cambio de disposición mental que ha venido apropiadamente en llamarse conversión es que para muchos entre nosotros ni el cielo ni la tierra contienen revelación alguna hasta que cierta personalidad toca la suya con su influencia particular y los torna receptivos.

Mas, minha querida Mrs. Casaubon (...) -, o carácter não é uma peça de mármore... não é algo de sólido e inalterável. É algo que está vivo e se transforma, e pode adoecer, como também acontece com o nosso corpo.

Development and catastrophe can often be measured by nothing clumsier than the moment-hand.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self — never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming

she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation.

It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it... Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy - the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.