Quotes about Transformation
But still — that is our vocation: to convert the hostis into a hospes, the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.
— Henri Nouwen
Spiritual formation is not about steps or stages on the way to perfection. It's about the movements from the mind to the heart through prayer in its many forms that reunite us with God, each other, and our truest selves.
— Henri Nouwen
The years that lie behind you, with all their struggles and pains, will in time be remembered only as the way that led you to your new life.
— Henri Nouwen
Our cup is often so full of pain that joy seems completely unreachable. When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.
— Henri Nouwen
One of the most beautiful things is that when we let the enemy go out of our heart by love and forgiveness, we are suddenly free to let that unlimited, all-embracing love of God pour into us. We become a new person every time we forgive an enemy, because we let go of the angry person inside who was holding on to fear.
— Henri Nouwen
Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted or enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.
— Henry David Thoreau
Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream-world into a reality.
— Henry David Thoreau
The seasons and all their changes are in me.
— Henry David Thoreau
You can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day.
— Henry David Thoreau
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
— Henry David Thoreau
Not till we are completely lost or turned around, do we begin to find ourselves.
— Henry David Thoreau
This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I
— Henry David Thoreau