Selected transformation quotes

1. I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.

2. Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

3. The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

4. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

5. And the look on her face as she opened the door Was like an old joke told by a friend. It'd taken ten more years but she'd found her smile And I watched the corners start to bend.

6. There is exchange of all things for fire and of fire for all things, as there is of wares for gold and of gold for wares.

7. Tell us, pray, what devil This melancholy is, which can transform Men into monsters.

8. In other words, the real problem is not exterior. The real problem is interior. The real problem is how to get people to internally transform, from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric consciousness, which is the only stance that can grasp the global dimensions of the problem in the first place, and thus the only stance that can freely, even eagerly, embrace global solutions.

9. Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

10. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

11. If they can make penicillin out of mouldy bread, they can sure make something out of you.

12. Monarch of earth, I shall confess my secret craft: I've always fought to purify wild flame to light, and kindle whatever light I found to burst in flame.

13. If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.

14. Feel like Christ and you will be a Christ; feel like Buddha and you will be a Buddha. It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God.

15. As soon as you know the voice and understand what it is, the whole scene changes. The same world which was the ghastly battlefield of maya is now changed into something good and beautiful.

16. The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.

17. The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

18. The mantra is forget your size discover your shape and transform yourself.

19. I first saw the site for Disneyland back in 1953, In those days it was all flat land - no rivers, no mountains, no castles or rocket ships - just orange groves, and a few acres of walnut trees.

20. And ah for a man to arise in me, That the man I am may cease to be!

21. This is what Wisdom means: To be changed without the slightest effort on your part, to be transformed, believe it or not, merely by waking to the reality that is not words, that lies beyond the reach of words. If you are fortunate enough to be Awakened thus, you will know why the finest language is the one that is not spoken, the finest action is the one that is not done and the finest change is the one that is not willed.

22. All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs.

23. We're not earthly beings any more: we're cosmic beings.

24. Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.

25. See ye not, Courtesy Is the true Alchemy, Turning to gold all it touches and tries?

26. 'The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.'

27. [I wouldn't mind turning into] a vermilion goldfish.

28. The demons are innumerable, arrive at the most inappropriate times and create panic and terror... but I have learned that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage.... Lilies often grow out of carcasses' arseholes.

29. Man is immortal; therefore he must die endlessly. For life is a creative idea; it can only find itself in changing forms.

30. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

31. A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty.

32. When I become death, death is the seed from which I grow.

33. Fire he sang, that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames. New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer. As though his lyre (now I knew its name) were both frost and fire, its chords flamed up to the crown of me. I was seed again. I was fern in the swamp. I was coal.

34. Love is described by the Sufis as the remedy of all ills and the alchemy of existence. Love transforms poverty into riches, pauper into prince, war into peace, ignorance into knowledge and hell into heaven.

35. Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. They are more or less isomorphic to transformations of reality. The transformational structures of which knowledge consists are not copies of the transformations in reality; they are simply possible isomorphic models among which experience can enable us to choose. Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate.

36. Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!

37. All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe--if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.'

38. Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.

39. If a man gives way to all his desires, or panders to them, there will be no inner struggle in him, no 'friction,' no fire. But if, for the sake of attaining a definite aim, he struggles with the desires that hinder him, he will then create a fire which will gradually transform his inner world into a single whole.

40. All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

41. Kiss that frog, lady kiss that frog Get wet, get wet

42. Part of me remained forever at Latitude 80 degrees 08 minutes South: what survived of my youth, my vanity, perhaps, and certainly my skepticism. On the other hand, I did take away something that I had not fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive, and a humble set of values. All this happened four years ago. Civilization has not altered my ideas. I live more simply now, and with more peace. ~ Ch. 12

43. Been tryin to make a million, by hustlin since my adolescense/From crack dealin to rap villian, my new profession

44. 'He shows up, he looks shitty, he's got junk equipment, he looks like he's just got up and I want to punch him, and then Aaron starts playing and on the first note it's like, 'You're the guy.' He wasn't trying to be me, and play like I play. He played and chaos came out. It immediately made the band turn into something else'- Trent Reznor

45. I say, life and figure are distinct attributes of one substance, and as one and the same body may be transmuted into all kinds of figures; and as the perfecter figure comprehends that which is more imperfect; so one and the same body may be transmuted from one degree of life to another more perfect, which always comprehends in it the inferior. We have an example of figure in a triangular prism, which is the first figure of all right lined solid triangular prism, which is the first figure of all right lined solid bodies, where into a body is convertible; and from this into a cube, which is a perfecter figure, and comprehends in it a prism; from a cube it may be turned into a more perfect figure, which comes nearer to a globe, and from this into another, which is yet nearer; and so it ascends from one figure, more imperfect to another more perfect, ad infinitum; for here are no bounds; nor can it be said, this body cannot be changed into a perfecter figure: But the meaning is that that body consists of plane right lines; and this is always chageablee into a perfecter figure, and yet can never reach to the perfection of a globe, although it always approaches nearer unto it; the case is the same in diverse degrees of life, which have indeed a beginning, but no end; so that the creature is always capable of a farther and perfecter degree of life, ad infinitum, and yet can never attain to be equal with God; for he is still infinitely more perfect than a creature, in its highest elevation or perfection, even as a globe is the most perfect of all other figures, unto which none can approach.

46. He says, 'There's nothing left of me. I'm like a ruby held up to the sunrise. Is it still a stone, or a world made of redness? It has no resistance to sunlight.' This is how Hallaj said, I am God, and told the truth! The ruby and the sunrise are one. Be courageous and discipline yourself. Completely become hearing and ear, and wear this sun-ruby as an earring.

47. From humble Port to imperial Tokay.

48. Before Elvis, everything was in black and white. Then came Elvis. Zoom, glorious Technicolor.

49. You know the day destroys the night, Night divides the day, Tried to run - Tried to hide - Break on through to the other side!

50. The House has noticed the Prime Minister's remarkable transformation in the past few weeks, from Stalin to Mr Bean.

51. The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety. Now, the same conquest of the outside world that brought in our modern individualism, so different from that of the Renaissance, is by way of relativizing the individual. It is plain to see that man's faculty of transformation, which began by a remaking of the natural world, has ended by calling man himself into question.

52. Here's a pot with a cot in a park In a park where the peach-blossoms blew, Where the lovers eloped in the dark, Lived, died and were changed into two Bright birds that eternally flew Through the boughs of the may, as they sang; 'T is a tale was undoubtedly true In the reign of the Emperor Hwang.

53. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

54. And all in a hurry, for fear her mind would change, she said the words [for a different spell] (nothing will induce me to tell you what they were). Then she waited for something to happen. - As nothing happened she began looking at the pictures. And all at once she saw the very last thing she expected - a picture of a third-class carriage in a train, with two schoolgirls sitting in it. ... Only now it was much more than a picture. It was alive. She could see the telegraph posts flicking past outside the window.... (ch. 10)

55. Die before you Die. There is no chance after.

56. You took off your clothes and left on the light, You stood there so brave, you used to be shy, Each feature improved, each movement refined, And eyes like a showroom.

57. Breathe 'God,' in any tongue -it means the same; LOVE ABSOLUTE: Think, feel, absorb the thought; Shut out all else; until a subtle flame (A spark from God's creative centre caught) Shall permeate your being, and shall glow, Increasing in its splendour, till, YOU KNOW.

58. Still, as I mused, the naked room, The alien firelight died away; And from the midst of cheerless gloom I passed to bright, unclouded day.

59. Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.

60. Pero ya duerme sin fin. Ya los musgos y la hierba abren con dedos seguros la flor de su calavera. Y su sangre ya viene cantando: cantando por marismas y praderas, resbalando por cuernos ateridos, vacilando sin alma por la niebla, tropezando con miles de pezunas como una larga, oscura, triste lengua, para formar un charco de agonia junto al Guadalquivir de las estrellas. ?Oh blanco muro de Espana! ?Oh negro toro de pena! ?Oh sangre dura de Ignacio! ?Oh ruisenor de sus venas!

61. In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.

62. There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

63. The challenge was to capture the stillness of him. I have kind of semi-frantic, nervous energy. Harnessing that was something I thought I'd have to work out. Shooting in the wilderness, the stillness became like this innate quality.

64. The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.

65. I used to think like Moses. That knocked me down for a couple years and put me in prison. Then I start thinking like Job. Job waited and became the wealthiest and richest man ever 'cause he believed in God.

66. I'm gazing at church and palace, ruin and column, Like a serious man making sensible use of a journey, But soon it will happen, and all will be one vast temple, Love's temple, receiving its new initiate. Though you're a whole world, Rome, still, without Love, The world isn't the world, and Rome can't be Rome.

67. For I am every dead thing, In whom love wrought new alchemy. For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

68. It took kind of meeting that right girl, her getting pregnant, and that whole beauty of nine months waiting for the kid and then BOOM - there's your baby and you go, 'My God, there is my life.' (2006)

69. Wings I saw springing from fair women's shoulders, and from beneath rubble I've seen butterflies flutter.

70. Peoples are made of hate and of love, and more of hate than love. But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything.

71. It breaks immortality's neck Contemplates crime and therefore halts it; It humbles barbarous nations And makes of savages, champions.

72. I never deal in transformations, for they are not honest, and no respectable sorceress likes to make things appear to be what they are not.

73. At this exquisite vision Tip's old comrades stared in wonder for the space of a full minute, and then every head bent low in honest admiration of the lovely Princess Ozma. The girl herself cast one look into Glinda's bright face, which glowed with pleasure and satisfaction, and then turned upon the others. Speaking the words with sweet diffidence, she said: 'I hope none of you will care less for me than you did before. I'm just the same Tip, you know; only - only - ' 'Only you're different!' said the Pumpkinhead; and everyone thought it was the wisest speech he had ever made.

74. '(I got introduced to) the late and great Mani Madhava Cakyar's King Udayana in Svapnavasavadatta. In what may have been among his last performances on the public stage I was fortunate to see Sri Cakyar, who at an advanced age, literally threw away his walking stick as he entered the stage to become a sprightly royal lover pining away for his beloved Vasavadatta. At his home in Likkadi he demonstrated the nava rasas... Sri Cakyar vividly illustrated to me that kutiyattam acting has the power to transform even the oldest person into the character he portrays' - Prof. Farley P. Richmond (Expert on Indian theatre), Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Georgia.[13]

75. The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. Why now? Because the change is also exponential - small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences tomorrow.

76. The whole day was strange, stunning, and it was a shattering experience. The past was disappearing, as if it had never belonged to me, as if I had read about it somewhere, as if I had dreamed about it, as if it was somebody else's story I have heard and somebody told it to me. I was becoming loose from my past, I was being uprooted from my history, I was losing my autobiography. I was becoming a non-being, what Buddha calls anatta. Boundaries were disappearing, distinctions were disappearing.

77. There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

78. Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

79. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become.

80. Love is the only bow on Life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart - builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody - for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.

81. In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis - gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.

82. I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence.

83. I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going thorough a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.

84. The master word [work]... is the open sesame to every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher's stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold.

85. I think it just wakes you up and kind of gives you the opportunity to be who you really are. Before my kids came along I was freaked out to hold a kid. When I was a teenager and my brother had babies, I was always freaked out to hold them. They just seemed so fragile. I'd hold them for a minute and then, 'Okay, here. Take the kid.' So I was surprised how quickly, almost instantly, I was okay with my own baby. Within 24 hours I was fine with it all the diapers, everything. One of the most amazing moments in my life was holding my brand-new baby, Lily-Rose, just after she was born. She wasn't three hours old, and I was holding her. Her little eyes were kind of half open. She was drifting into sleep. Looking into those little eyes, I thought, 'My God, I'll never be closer to another human being in my life. And you're not, until your second one comes. Before the second one came, there was this strange thing, a snippet of worry. I thought, 'How can I love the second as much as the first? Is it possible?' And when little Jack arrived, it was instant. Instant. They just seem so fragile. (2004)

86. Love is like dying.