#transformation

Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military. ↗

— Barack Obama

#afghanistan #defensive #iraq #lack #military

Transformation in the world happens when people are healed and start investing in other people. ↗

— Michael W. Smith

#healed #investing #other #people #start

Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.
 ↗

— Dark Jar Tin Zoo

#amazement #amazing #commas #editing #funny

To regret the exchange of earthly pleasures for the joys of Heaven, is as if the grovelling caterpillar should lament that it must one day quit the nibbled leaf to soar aloft and flutter through the air, roving at will from flower to flower, sipping sweet honey from their cups, or basking in their sunny petals. If these little creatures knew how great a change awaited them, no doubt they would regret it; but would not all such sorrow be misplaced? ↗

— Anne Brontë

#death #fear #heaven #transformation #change

If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. ↗

— Donald Miller

#change

To live meant feeding my former self to my current self. ↗

— Cameron Conaway

#past #present #transformation #life

The political writer, then is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives. ↗

— Cherríe L. Moraga Gloria Anzaldua

#change

...your tranquil yes to the changing over into the formless void of the unlimited. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#the-void #timelessness #transformation #change

Quoting from Thomas Merton Dialogues With Silence The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and, when he is answered it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God. (17) ↗

— Stephen Cope

#darkness #god #light #silence #transformation

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#change #courage #depression #dragons #fears