Inspirational Transformer Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Inspirational Transformer. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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It’s only after you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone that you begin to change, grow, and transform.
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Roy T. Bennett
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Don't Just Don't just learn, experience. Don't just read, absorb. Don't just change, transform. Don't just relate, advocate. Don't just promise, prove. Don't just criticize, encourage. Don't just think, ponder. Don't just take, give. Don't just see, feel. Don’t just dream, do. Don't just hear, listen. Don't just talk, act. Don't just tell, show. Don't just exist, live.
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Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
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One Choice One Choice, decided your friends. One Choice, defines your beliefs. One Choice, determines your loyalties - Forever. ONCE CHOICE CAN TRANSFORM YOU
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Veronica Roth (Divergent (Divergent, #1))
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As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
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Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
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Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: β€œIt’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to." [MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]
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Jim Jarmusch
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Dream, Dream Dream Dreams transform into thoughts And thoughts result in action.
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A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
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It's a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.
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Germany Kent
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Whenever I am in a difficult situation where there seems to be no way out, I think about all the times I have been in such situations and say to myself, "I did it before, so I can do it again.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education
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Tara Westover (Educated)
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Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies. (from "Loving Your Enemies")
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Martin Luther King Jr. (A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.)
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One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
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Let your creative and imaginative mind run freely; it will take you places you never dreamed of and provide breakthroughs that others once thought were impossible.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. Nobody else can.
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Michael A. Singer (The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself)
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Things are sometimes faded but they will always become clear, where there seems nothing but bad look closer, you’re sure to find good.
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Sherman Kennon (Whisk Of Dust: Too Unseen Distance)
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Faith moves mountains, love transforms hearts.
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John Paul Warren
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Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.
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Patti Smith
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We are all butterflies. Earth is our chrysalis.
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LeeAnn Taylor
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When you become the image of your own imagination, it's the most powerful thing you could ever do.
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RuPaul
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People who love themselves come across as very loving, generous and kind; they express their self-confidence through humility, forgiveness and inclusiveness.
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Sanaya Roman (Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation)
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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.
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Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
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When blame and self-judgement are transformed, healed, and cease to be, we have reawakened without the myth, the mythos, of separation. We are One.
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Wendy E. Slater (Into the Hearth, Poems-Volume 14)
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Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.
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BrenΓ© Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
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Kindness has no religion. Religions are like narrow tracks but kindness is like an open sky.
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Amit Ray (Nonviolence: The Transforming Power)
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Today is a new day and it brings with it a new set of opportunities for me to act on. I am attentive to the opportunities and I seize them as they arise. I have full confidence in myself and my abilities. I can do all things that I commit myself to. No obstacle is too big or too difficult for me to handle because what lies inside me is greater than what lies ahead of me. I am committed to improving myself and I am getting better daily. I am not held back by regret or mistakes from the past. I am moving forward daily. Absolutely nothing is impossible for me.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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Let your life reflect the faith you have in God. Fear nothing and pray about everything. Be strong, trust God's word, and trust the process.
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Germany Kent
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It's not about perfect. It's about effort. And when you bring that effort every single day, that's where transformation happens. That's how change occurs.
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Jillian Michaels
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Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.
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BrenΓ© Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
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Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.
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Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth)
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The energy of hatred won't get you anywhere; but the energy of forgiveness, which reveals itself through love, will transform your life in a positive way.
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Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)
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Truly powerful people have great humility. They do not try to impress, they do not try to be influential. They simply are. People are magnetically drawn to them. They are most often very silent and focused, aware of their core selves. ... They never persuade, nor do they use manipulation or aggressiveness to get their way. They listen. If there is anything they can offer to assist you, they offer it; if not, they are silent.
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Sanaya Roman (Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation)
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It’s a humbling realization that sometimes what we think we want may not align with what God knows we truly need.
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Gregory S. Works (Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation)
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Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.
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Rashedur Ryan Rahman
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Live your life in such a way that you'll be remembered for your kindness, compassion, fairness, character, benevolence, and a force for good who had much respect for life, in general.
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Germany Kent
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Having inner peace means committing to letting go of self-criticism and self-doubt.
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Sanaya Roman (Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation)
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Souls reconstructed with faith transform agony into peace.
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Aberjhani (The River of Winged Dreams)
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I encourage readers recovering from a kidney transplant to heed the advice of their medical practitioners.
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Gregory S. Works (Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation)
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To say nothing is saying something. You must denounce things you are against or one might believe that you support things you really do not.
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Germany Kent
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Kindness can transform someone's dark moment with a blaze of light. You'll never know how much your caring matters. Make a difference for another today.
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Amy Leigh Mercree
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I didn't need to transform after all. My name is Harriet Manners and I am a geek. And maybe that's not so bad after all.
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Holly Smale (Geek Girl (Geek Girl, #1))
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God’s mercy and grace over y circumstances propelled my faith and caused me to experience significant spiritual growth.
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Gregory S. Works (Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation)
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I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. With that definition in mind, let’s think about love. Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrowβ€”that’s vulnerability.
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BrenΓ© Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
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I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits.
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BrenΓ© Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
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None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know we can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we're told not to judge. Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.
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Brennan Manning (The Wisdom of Tenderness: What Happens When God's Fierce Mercy Transforms Our Lives)
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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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John Updike
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Meditation is the process of transformation and beautification of soul from a leaf-eating caterpillar to a nectar-sipping butterfly. It grows with the wings of love and compassion.
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Amit Ray (Meditation: Insights and Inspirations)
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Convince yourself everyday that you are worthy of a good life. Let go of stress, breathe. Stay positive, all is well.
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Germany Kent
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Don't live the same day over and over again and call that a life. Life is about evolving mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.
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Germany Kent
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Kindness is universal. Sometimes being kind allows others to see the goodness in humanity through you. Always be kinder than necessary.
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Germany Kent
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Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection.
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BrenΓ© Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
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Change happens for you the moment you want something more than you fear it.
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Eric Micha'el Leventhal
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Shout out to everyone transcending a mindset, mentality, desire, belief, emotion, habit, behavior or vibration, that no longer serves them.
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Lalah Delia
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Advice to my younger self: 1 Start where you are with what you have 2 Try not to hurt other people 3 Take more chances 4 If you fail, keep trying
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Germany Kent
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To only responsible choice I can make is to be love and happiness." Vincellent "Love the world as you love yourself".Lao Tze "The next step in mans evolution will be the survival of the wisest.
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Deepak Chopra
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In the measurement world, you set a goal and strive for it. In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold.
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Benjamin Zander (The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life)
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You do not need to pay attention to those voices within you that create pain, or make you feel less competent, smart or able.
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Sanaya Roman (Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation)
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For those who choose the worldly way, tantra works wonders... It helps us transform our desires into divine experiences. Imagine sexuality as the gateway to moksha rather than a hindrance
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Merlin Franco (Saint Richard Parker)
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DETOX your mind, body, AND your contact list.
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SupaNova Slom (The Remedy: The Five-Week Power Plan to Detox Your System, Combat the Fat, and Rebuild Your Mind and Body)
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I am Not, but the Universe is my Self.
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Shih-t'ou
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The light of compassion opens the petals of the heart. When the petals of the heart unfold fragrance spreads across the valley.
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Amit Ray (Nonviolence: The Transforming Power)
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Honor your challenges, for those spaces that you label as dark are actually there to bring you more light, to strengthen you, to firm your resolve, and to bring out the best in you.
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Sanaya Roman (Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation)
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Don't ever stop believing in your own transformation. It is still happening even on days you may not realize it or feel like it.
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Lalah Delia
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Any day above ground is a good day. Before you complain about anything, be thankful for your life and the things that are still going well.
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Germany Kent
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We can see the Divine in each speck of dust, but that doesn't stop us from wiping it away with a wet sponge. The Divine doesn't disappear; it's transformed into the clean surface.
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Paulo Coelho (The Witch of Portobello)
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You become what you digest into your spirit. Whatever you think about, focus on, read about, talk about, you’re going to attract more of into your life. Make sure they're all positive.
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Germany Kent
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We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a β€˜higher answer’– but none exists
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Stephen Jay Gould
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The beauty of this idea is that my decision to keep Peeta alive at the expense of my own life is itself an act of defiance. A refusal to play the Hunger Games by the Capitol's rules. My private agenda dovetails completely with my public one. And if I really could save Peeta... in terms of a revolution, this would be ideal. Because I will be more valuable dead. They can turn me into some kind of martyr for the cause and paint my face on banners, and it will do more to rally people than anything I could do if I was living. But Peeta would be more valuable alive, and tragic, because he will be able to turn his pain into words that will transform people.
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Suzanne Collins (Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2))
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Dreaming carries no risks. The dangerous thing is trying to transform your dreams into reality.
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Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
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What made her most beautiful, was the way she quietly touched those around her unknowingly changing the lives of the many, she smiled at. She didn't want praise; approval or admiration, she just wanted all of whom she loved to be the most authentic side of themselves & openly living to the means of their hearts & truth.
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Nikki Rowe (Once a Girl, Now a Woman)
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Your attitude determines how you experience the world.
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Sanaya Roman (Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation)
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MOM Wholeheartedly, She loved me- And inspired me- With transcending devotion. It was a blessing- To have been her son, To have been loved- Without conditions. Her words of wisdom- Opened my eyes- To the world- And to myself. By seeing the best in me, She empowered me. By believing in me, She transformed me. She grew old- And floated away, But her love remains standing- Eternally by my side.
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Giorge Leedy (Uninhibited From Lust To Love)
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Love transforms, Love heals. But sometimes it lays deadly traps and ends up destroying the person who decided to surrender himself completely.
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Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
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How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
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Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
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Anyone can get a job, but do you have a purpose?
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Tom Butler-Bowdon (50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books to Transform Your Life from Timeless Sages to Contemporary Gurus)
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Some people spend their whole lives seeking heaven, when all they needed to do was look about them, and embrace that which was already there.
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Tom Althouse (The Frowny Face Cow)
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Sometimes to change a situation you are in requires you to take a giant leap. But, you won't be able to fly unless you are willing to transform.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, β€œAs Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.
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Gabriel GarcΓ­a MΓ‘rquez
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The key to ultimate happiness and fulfillment lies within our own transformation. The more we learn and grow and evolve as individuals, the more we will find happiness and satisfaction in relationships, work and life.
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Kristi Bowman
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How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.
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Benjamin Zander (The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life)
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Meditation is an essential travel partner on your journey of personal transformation. Meditation connects you with your soul,and this connection gives you access to your intuition, your heartfelt desires, your integrity, and the inspiration to create a life you love.
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Sarah McLean
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It's like an emotional dance party: Some dances will be your favorites -- others more awkward or difficult to learn. Some will be boring or make you mad. some you will wish you never needed to do again. But AHA! You think. I will dance all the dances I can.
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SARK (Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity)
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I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. With that definition in mind, let's think about love. Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can't ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment's notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow- that's vulnerability. Love is uncertain. It's incredibly risky. And loving someone leaves us emotionally exposed. Yes, it's scary, and yes, we're open to being hurt, but can you imagine your life without loving or being loved?
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BrenΓ© Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
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Our only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort. It's not a comfortable conversation for any of us. It is risky and messy. It is haunting work to recall the sins of our past. But is this not the work we have been called to anyway? Is this not the work of the Holy Spirit to illuminate truth and inspire transformation? It's haunting. But it's also holy.
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Austin Channing Brown (I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness)
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The Bible is the Word of God: supernatural in origin, eternal in duration, inexpressible in valor, infinite in scope, regenerative in power, infallible in authority, universal in interest, personal in application, inspired in totality. Read it through, write it down, pray it in, work it out, and then pass it on. Truly it is the Word of God. It brings into man the personality of God; it changes the man until he becomes the epistle of God. It transforms his mind, changes his character, takes him on from grace to grace, and gives him an inheritance in the Spirit. God comes in, dwells in, walks in, talks through, and sups with him.
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Smith Wigglesworth
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The following day I abandoned my pointless searching and planted myself in one of the open air-cafΓ©s where I drank coffee and tried to find inspiration for the song I owed the Maer. Ten hours I spent there, and the only act of creation I accomplished was to magically transform nearly a gallon of coffee into marvelous, aromatic piss.
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Patrick Rothfuss (The Wise Man’s Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2))
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There ARE people who won't customarily eat an entire row of cookies, or hear food calling their name from other rooms, or who don't grind up food in the garbage disposal for fear of eating it, or get it back out of the garbage so they could eat it. Of course, my binge eating was just a cover-up for the larger issue: Trying to fill the emptiness
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SARK (Transformation Soup: Healing for the Splendidly Imperfect)
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The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.
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Zeena Schreck
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There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
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Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
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Sometimes you have to give up on people. Not because you don't care but because they don't. A person's actions will tell you everything you need to know. Love yourself enough to say goodbye to those who don't make time for you or don't know how to love you back. Let go of what hurts, even if it hurts to let go." ~ Jennifer Green
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Jennifer Green (Winning While Losing: The Upside of Heartbreak)
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Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalisticβ€”in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the systemβ€”learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attentionβ€”may radically transform one’s life.
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Sam Harris (Free Will)
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Want the change. Be inspired by the flame where everything shines as it disappears. The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much as the curve of the body as it turns away. What locks itself in sameness has congealed. Is it safer to be gray and numb? What turns hard becomes rigid and is easily shattered. Pour yourself like a fountain. Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins. Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel, dares you to become the wind. - Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XII
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Rainer Maria Rilke (Sonnets to Orpheus)
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The cards give you images and symbols to focus your vague intentions and transform them into action. Your will is the magic. In other words, you are the magic. If you can create something in your heart and then act on it to make it happen, that is magic. Very simple, very straightforwardβ€”no witches, no spells, and no broomsticks.
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Theresa Cheung (Teen Tarot: What the Cards Reveal About You and Your Future)
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The way you are self-sabotaging: Mindlessly scrolling through social media as a way to pass the time. What your subconscious mind might want you to know: This is one of the easiest ways to numb yourself, because it is so accessible and addictive. There is a world-altering difference between using social media in a healthy way versus as a coping mechanism. Mostly, it has to do with how you feel after you’re finished. If you don’t put the phone down feeling inspired or relaxed, you’re probably trying to avoid some kind of discomfort within yourselfβ€”the very discomfort that just might be telling you that you need to change.
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Brianna Wiest (The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery)
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If you chase anything in life chase the things that get you excited about living. Chase the things that give you hope, happiness and a glimpse of a better life. Chase the things that make you want to be a better person. Chase the things that inspire you to think, create and live joyfully. Chase the things that reinforce in your soul that you can make a difference. Chase the things that make you want to transform your heart from selfish to selfless. When you chase that kind of storm you are chasing rainbows.
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Shannon L. Alder
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We often hesitate to follow our intuition out of fear. Most usually, we are afraid of the changes in our own life that our actions will bring. Intuitive guidance, however, is all about change. It is energetic data ripe with the potential to influence the rest of the world. To fear change but to crave intuitive clarity is like fearing the cold, dark night while pouring water on the fire that lights your cave. An insight the size of a mustard seed is powerful enough to bring down a mountain-sized illusion that may be holding our lives together. Truth strikes without mercy. We fear our intuitions because we fear the transformational power within our revelations.
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Caroline Myss
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No matter what activity or practice we are pursuing, there isn't anything that isn't made easier through constant familiarity and training. Through training, we can change; we can transform ourselves. Within Buddhist practice there are various methods of trying to sustain a calm mind when some disturbing event happens. Through repeated practice of these methods we can get to the point where some disturbance may occur but the negative effects on our mind remain on the surface, like the waves that may ripple on the surface of an ocean but don't have much effect deep down. And, although my own experience may be very little, I have found this to be true in my own small practice. So, if I receive some tragic news, at that moment I may experience some disturbance within my mind, but it goes very quickly. Or, I may become irritated and develop some anger, but again, it dissipates very quickly. There is no effect on the deeper mind. No hatred. This was achieved through gradual practice; it didn't happen overnight.' Certainly not. The Dalai Lama has been engaged in training his mind since he was four years old.
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Dalai Lama XIV (The Art of Happiness)
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Second, nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation. If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world changing. Think about thisβ€”adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved and make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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Zhuangzi's wife died. When Huizu went to convey his condolences, he found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. "You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old," said Huizu. "It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing - this is going too far, isn't it?" Zhuangzi said, "You're wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn't grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there's been another change and she's dead. It's just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter. "Now she's going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate. So I stopped.
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Zhuangzi (The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu)
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We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values. So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body -- what is authentic, what is archaic -- and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment -- these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals. We have to get away from that; and the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body -- and that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded, exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation. The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination. Thank you very, very much.
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Terence McKenna (The Archaic Revival)