Transfiguration Quotes

Repentance can become a very, very deep phenomenon in you if you understand the responsibility. Then even a small thing, if it becomes a repentance
not just verbal, not just on the surface; if it goes deep to the roots, if you repent from the roots; if your whole being shakes and trembles and cries, and tears come out; not only out of your eyes but out of every cell of your body, then repentance can become a transfiguration. ~ Osho

And I see what I am. I'm amputated. I have hacked my life up into grace moments and curse moments. The chopping that has cut myself off from the embracing love of a God who "does not enjoy hurting people or causing them sorrow" (Lamentations 3:33), but labors to birth grief into greater grace. Isn't this the crux of the gospel? The good news that all those living in the land of shadow of death have been birthed into new life, that the transfiguration of a suffering ~ Ann Voskamp

The Transfiguration is the summer lightning of the coming Resurrection. Also of our own resurrection, for we too are to partake ~ Romano Guardini

The human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration. ~ John O'Donohue

Existence is god called through love, provoked through love. The moment you become capable of prayer, existence becomes god. The moment you become capable of deep love, life becomes god. It is a transfiguration of the same energy. ~ Rajneesh

Every living thing suffers transfiguration. Yes, until the creation of Eve, Adam had fondled beasts. ~ Joy Williams

Paganism therefore implies the rejection of this discontinuity, this rupture, this fundamental tear, which is the "dualistic fiction," which, as Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist, "degenerated God into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! ~ Alain De Benoist

Profound music leads us beyond language ... to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence. ~ Cornel West

Spirituality is the art of transfiguration. We should not force ourselves to change by hammering our lives into any predetermined shape. We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program or plan for our lives. Rather, we need to practice a new art of attention to the inner rhythm of our days and lives. This attention brings a new awareness of our own human and divine presence. ~ John O'Donohue

Anna, I only know this: when it is your turn to die - my turn, anyone's - when it is time for you to let go of one life and reach out for another, you will be left with no choice but to hurl yourself willingly into the mother arms of transfiguration. It's not an end. It's a beginning. ~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

He's been so changeable with her I'm surprised he's not been accepted to Hogwarts for his transfiguration skills. ~ Holly Bourne

I've always had a fascination for the stage which has to do with transfiguration. One moment you are John Smith from East Brighton riding in your cart, and the next moment you are in a completely different world. ~ Robert Dessaix

Faith is more than a matter of heart alone. The unique position of Transfiguration Sunday and its beautiful theophanies declares that the mountain is never the end of the journey. God does not gather us together just for a divine fireworks display, God always has something to say, usually something to ask. BRIAN ERICKSON ~ Kathleen Long Bostrom

All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Christ illustrates the purport of life as He descends from His transfiguration to toil, and goes forward to exchange that robe of heavenly brightness for the crown of thorns. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

My dad's one true quest in life was for the Platonic ideal of peanut butter. And I remember one day he announced, with a look of utter transfiguration on his face, that he had found paradise on Earth in a jar with a yellow cap. And it was called Red Wing. ~ Christopher Buckley

Time does not really exist as we know it; rather it's a transfiguration of a concept in which mortality, mutability, is conditioned. ~ Frederick Lenz

The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling; a beauty different from the beauty of landscape and the cold perfect form. This is a beauty that has suffered its way through the ache of desolation until the words or music emerged to equal the hunger and desperation at its heart. It must also be said that not all woundedness succeeds in finding its way through to beauty of form. Most woundedness remains hidden, lost inside forgotten silence. Indeed, in every life there is some wound that continues to weep secretly, even after years of attempted healing. Where woundedness can be refined into beauty a wonderful transfiguration takes place. ~ John O'Donohue

Listen to Jesus and follow him. That's the message of the Transfiguration. ~ Pope Francis

Nobody could ascend before transfigured. ~ Toba Beta

Sex that accomplishes this kind of transfiguration is a drug. It is not an easy thing to deny yourself once you know exactly where to get it. ~ Ariel Levy

You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I do not mean merely in its adding to enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its strength, or that more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was thinking when he said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned expression in the face of science, and that when science would put on a form of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion and deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first and Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on the artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the sense of limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the characteristics of the real artist. ~ Oscar Wilde

She had had the idea that the mineral world was a world of perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order of crystals and molecules beneath its sprouts and flows and branches. She had thought, when she started thinking, about her own transfiguration as something profoundly unnatural, a move from a world of warm change and decay to a world of cold permanence.But as she became mineral, and looked into the idea of minerals, she saw that there were reciprocities, both physical and figurative. ~ A.S. Byatt

Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration. ~ Octavio Paz

Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan--it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution--tiger, tiger burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic.

Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will . . . they could never be known in every detail and they never should be. ~ Lydia Millet

Parvati positively beamed. Harry could tell that she was feeling guilty for having laughed at Hermione in Transfiguration. He looked around and saw that Hermione was beaming back, if possible even more brightly. Girls were very strange sometimes. ~ J.K. Rowling

Professor Moody!" said a shocked voice.
Professor McGonagall was coming down the marble staircase with her arms full of books.
"Hello, Professor McGonagall," said Moody calmly, bouncing the ferret still higher.
"What - what are you doing?" said Professor McGonagall, her eyes following the bouncing ferret's progress through the air.
"Teaching," said Moody.
"Teach - Moody, is that a student?" shrieked Professor McGonagall, the books spilling out of her arms.
"Yep," said Moody.
"No!" cried Professor McGonagall, running down the stairs and pulling out her wand; a moment later, with a loud snapping noise, Draco Malfoy had reappeared, lying in a heap on the floor with his sleek blond hair all over his now brilliantly pink face. He got to his feet, wincing.
"Moody, we never use transfiguration as a punishment!" said Professor McGonagall weakly. "Surely Professor Dumbledore told you that?"
"He might have mentioned it, yeah," said Moody, scratching his chin unconcernedly. ~ J.K. Rowling

The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across the high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration. ~ Wallace Stegner

In the Orthodox ecclesial experience and tradition a sacrament is understood primarily as a revelation of the genuine nature of creation, of the world, which, however much it has fallen as "this world," will remain God's world, awaiting salvation, redemption, healing and transfiguration in a new earth and a new heaven. In other words, in the Orthodox experience a sacrament is primarily a revelation of the sacramentality of creation itself, for the world was created and given to man for conversion of creaturely life into participation in divine life. If in baptism water can become a "laver of regeneration," if our earthy food - bread and wine - can be transformed into partaking of the body and blood of Christ, if with oil we are granted the anointment of the Holy Spirit, if, to put it briefly, everything in the world can be identified, manifested and understood as a gift of God and participation in the new life, it is because all of creation was originally summoned and destined for the fulfillment of the divine economy - "then God will be all in all. ~ Alexander Schmemann

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance - for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light ... Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? ... Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. ~ Marilynne Robinson

What a transfiguration it is to love! And the little shrieks, the pursuits in the grass, the waists encircled by stealth, the jargon that is melody, the adoration that breaks through in the way a syllable is said, those cherries snatched form one pair of lips by another - It all catches fire and turns into celestial glories. ~ Victor Hugo

God places us in the world as his fellow workers-agents of transfiguration. We work with God so that injustice is transfigured into justice, so there will be more compassion and caring, that there will be more laughter and joy, that there will be more togetherness in God's world. ~ Desmond Tutu

And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within - oh endlessly - within us! Whoever we may be at last.
Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn't it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

He is looking down on the two crystal balls that the old man's foul, strong hands have rolled across to him. In one he sees Margaret, not in her raincoat and her nodding plumes, but as she is transfigured in the light of eternity. Long he looks there; then drops a glance to the other, just long enough to see that in its depths Kitty and I walk in bright dresses through our glowing gardens. We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly inclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world. ~ Rebecca West

The central idea of the Eastern Fathers was that of theosis, the divinization of all creatures, the transfiguration of the world, the idea of the cosmos and not the idea of personal salvation ... Only later Christian consciousness began to value the idea of hell more than the idea of the transfiguration and divinization of the world ... The Kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, the universal resurrection, a new heaven and a new earth. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

To put it simply: the Holy Spirit bothers us. Because he moves us, he makes us walk, he pushes the Church to go forward. And we are like Peter at the Transfiguration: 'Ah, how wonderful it is to be here like this, all together!' ... But don't bother us. We want the Holy Spirit to doze off ... we want to domesticate the Holy Spirit. And that's no good. because he is God, he is that wind which comes and goes and you don't know where. He is the power of God, he is the one who gives us consolation and strength to move forward. But: to move forward! And this bothers us. It's so much nicer to be comfortable. ~ Pope Francis

I got a call from a record company offering me a contract, I did not want to take it because the Lord had pointed me in the direction of spiritual activity ... And then it was disclosed to me that I could do both spiritual and musical work. So for five years I executed that contract, and when it was finished, after I made the album Transfiguration, I didn't make another album until twenty-six years later. This new album, Translinear Light, came out of the pleading and constant appealing from my son Ravi Coltrane: 'Ma, please make a CD.' So I eventually agreed. ~ Alice Coltrane

To Him let us but cleave in all ouv strife; and the Tempte1 will flee; the wilderness will be desolate no more; angels will come and minister unto us; and when we pass from them to the ministry of life, be it to the glory of a transfiguration, the sorrows of a Gethsemane, or the sacrifice of the cross, the tran- quilizing peace of God will never be far from us. ~ James Martineau

On the mantelpiece, the photograph of a chimpanzee and a statuette of the Buddha. This proximity, more accidental than intentional, makes me wonder over and over where my place might be between these two extrems, man's pre and transfiguration. ~ Cioran

Transcendence transfigures; it does not reconcile, but rather transmutes opposites into something surpassing them that effaces their oppositions. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Most of us have developed a fairly extensive vocabulary for describing pain, as though the journal were a doctor requiring much detail to make the correct diagnosis. The roundness of the spiritual journey cannot be expressed without developing an equally extensive vocabulary for talking to ourselves and others about the nature of wonder, joy, ecstasy, love, transfiguration. ~ Christina Baldwin

When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time. On its outer surface time is vulnerable to transience. Regardless of its sadness or beauty, each day empties and vanishes. In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration. Time minds possibility and makes sure that nothing is lost or forgotten. That which seems to pass away on the surface of time is in fact transfigured and housed in the tabernacle of memory. Possibility is the secret heart of creativity. ~ John O'Donohue

Hello, Professor McGonagall," said Moody calmly, bouncing the ferret still higher.
"What - what are you doing?" said Professor McGonagall, her eyes following the bouncing ferret's progress through the air.
"Teaching," said Moody.
"Teach - Moody, is that a student?" shrieked Professor McGonagall, the books spilling out of her arms.
"Yep," said Moody.
"Moody, we never use Transfiguration as a punishment!" said Professor McGonagall weakly. ~ J.K. Rowling

The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward
into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell

The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life ... three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication and cruelty all belonging to the oldest festal joys. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Holy Scripture is in such sort the rule of the Christian faith that we are obliged by every kind of obligation to believe most exactly all that it contains and not to believe anything which may be ever so little contrary to it, for if Our Lord himself has sent the Jews to it894 to strengthen their faith, it must be a most safe standard. The Sadducees erred because they did not understand the Scriptures;895 they would have done better to attend to them, as to a light shin ing in a dark place, according to the advice of S. Peter,896 who having himself heard the voice of the Father in the transfiguration of the Son, bases himself more firmly on the testimony of the prophets than on this experience. ~ Francis De Sales

The transfiguration was a physical illustration of what the renewed mind looks like in the spiritual. ~ Bill Johnson

In the time of Jesus the mount of transfiguration was on the way to the cross. In our day the cross is on the way to the mount of transfiguration. If you would be on the mountain. you must consent to pass over the road to it. ~ Henry Clay Trumbull

The Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? ~ Marilynne Robinson

The new heavens and the new earth are not replacements for the old ones; they are transfigurations of them. The redeemed order is not the created order forsaken; it is the created order - all of it - raised and glorified. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

When we become incorruptible and immortal and attain to the blessed state of conformity with Christ, we will be ever with the Lord, gaining fulfillment in the purest contemplations of His visible theophany which will illuminate us with its most brilliant rays, just as it illuminated the disciples at the time of the most divine Transfiguration. This is the light of God, as St. John has said in his Revelation (Rev. 22:5), and such is the opinion of all the saints. ~ Gregory Palamas

I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

The present mood in which they sat relaxed was nothing more than the relief of two people coming back to a bombed building once familiar, shared as a dwelling, and finding all over the smashed foundations a rose-ash haze of willow herb. No more, no less. It is a ruin; but suspense at least, at least the need for sterile resolution, have evaporated with the fact of the return. Terror of nothingness contracts before the contemplation of it. It is not, after all, vacancy, but space; an area razed, roped off by time; by time refertilized, sown with a transfiguration, a ruin-haunting, ghost-spun No Man's crop of grace. ~ Rosamond Lehmann

Who're you writing the novel to anyway?" Ron asked Hermione, trying to read the bit of parchment now trailing on the floor. Hermione hitched it up out of sight.
"Viktor."
"Krum?"
"How many other Viktors do we know?"
Ron said nothing, but looked disgruntled. They sat in silence for another twenty minutes, Ron finishing his Transfiguration essay with many snorts of impatience, rolling in up carefully and sealing it, and Harry staring into the fire, wishing more than anything that Sirius's head would appear there and give him some advice about girls. But the fire merely crackled lower and lower, until the red-hot embers crumbled into ash and, looking around, Harry saw that they were, yet again, the last in the common room.
"Well, 'night," said Hermione, yawning widely, and she set off up the girls' staircase.
"What does she see in Krum?" Ron demanded as he and Harry climbed the boys' stairs.
"Well," said Harry, considering the matter, "I s'pose he's older, isn't he...and he's an international Quidditch player...."
"Yeah, but apart from that," said Ron, sounding aggravated. "I mean he's a grouchy git, isn't he? ~ J.K. Rowling

When higher beings allow us to see them, that's the very moment we begin to be one of them. ~ Toba Beta

It's a proper hideout, as long as one of us stays in here, they can't get at us, the door won't open. It's all down to Neville. He really gets this room. You've got to ask it for exactly what you need--like, 'I don't want any Carrow supporters to be able to get in'--and it'll do it for you! You've just got to make sure you close the loopholes! Neville's the man!"
"It's quite straightforward, really," said Neville modestly. "I'd been in here about a day and a half, and getting really hungry, and wishing I could get something to eat, and that's when the passage to the Hog's Head opened up. I went through it and met Aberforth. He's been providing us with food, because for some reason, that's the one thing the room doesn't really do."
"Yeah, well, food's one of the five exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration," said Ron to general astonishment. ~ J.K. Rowling

The new type of capitalists - the industrial leader - develops new talents with his new function in economic life and, above all, a new discipline and evaluation of labour. He allows commercial interests to recede to a certain extent and concentrates on the internal organization of his factory. The principle of expediency, methodical planning and calculability, which had become very important in the economy in the leading countries since the fifteenth century, now becomes all-powerful. The employer disciplines himself just as ruthless as he does his workmen and employees, and becomes just as much the slave of his concern as his staff. The raising of labour to the level of the ethical force, its glorification and adoration, is fundamentally nothing but the ideological transfiguration of the striving for success and profit and an attempt to stimulate even those elements who share least in the fruits of their labour into enthusiastic co-operation. The idea of freedom is part of the same ideology. ~ Arnold Hauser

Remember that vision on the Mount of Transfiguration; and let it be ours, even in the glare of earthly joys and brightnesses, to lift up our eyes, like those wondering three, and see no man any more, save Jesus only. ~ Alexander MacLaren

The Light of the Lord's Transfiguration does not come into being or cease to be, nor is it circumscribed or perceptible to the senses, even though for a short time on the narrow mountain top it was seen by human eyes. Rather, at that moment the initiated disciples of the Lord 'passed', as we have been taught, 'from flesh to spirit' by the transformation of their senses, which the Spirit wrought in them, and so they saw that ineffable light, when and as much as the Holy Spirit's power granted them to do so. ~ Gregory Palamas

He must have lit up the sky that day on the mountain, what we call the transfiguration.
Jesus on the mountaintop unveiled a foretaste of heaven and glory. Light filled him so that the witnesses remarked on a hue of white that was whiter than any shade possible.
It was a sci-fi transportation to another dimension and while Peter and John were still reeling, Moses and Elijah showed up.
It broke the barrier between heaven and earth for Jesus was the one who could belong to both at the same time. A citizen of heaven, a citizen of earth. ~ Sara Lowe

The hyperreal is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption, elevation to the strength of the model. Anticipation, deterrence, preventive transfiguration, etc.: the model acts as a sphere of absorption of the real. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Our Lord's descent from the holy heights of the Mount of Transfiguration was more than a physical return from greater to lesser altitudes; it was a passing from sunshine into shadow, from the effulgent glory of heaven to the mists of worldly passions and human unbelief; it was the beginning of His rapid descent into the valley of humiliation. ~ James E. Talmage

Then shadows and shapes, shrouded figures, appeared to join him, apparitions, ancient, mythical faces, wise and beautiful, like holy ghosts, shimmering around around him, beside him, beyond him, enveloped by a brume indescribable, shot through with shafts of pink and blue and gold, as though the heavens themselves had opened up and poured out the light into the world. ~ Peter McKinnon

It is as much our duty to live in the beauty of the presence of God on some mount of transfiguration until we become white with Christ as it is for us to go down where the needy people grope and grovel, and groan and lift them to new life. ~ Frank Laubach

Myths are the retrospective transfiguration of sacrificial crises, the reinterpretation of those crises in light of the cultural order that has arisen from them. ~ Rene Girard

The life of Jesus recapitulates key elements in the earlier story of Israel. For a moment, as Jesus stands on the mountain giving the famous sermon, he is Moses. For a moment, answering his critics about his actions on the sabbath, he is David. For a moment, as he calls and names the twelve disciples, he is perhaps Jacob, bringing the twelve patriarchs into the world. For a moment, healing the sick and raising the dead, he is Elijah or Elisha. And so on. In the transfiguration he actually meets Moses and Elijah. ~ N. T. Wright