transformative events Quotes

The experience of being in the Army changed my whole life; I never believed that an organization such as ours could ever go to war, leave alone win it. It was, as Yeats remarked of the Easter Rising, 'A terrible beauty.'

It might be hard to believe, but as difficult as cancer was, in some ways it was good for me.

Revolutions are like the most noxious dungheaps, which bring into life the noblest vegetables.

The things that change people's lives are usually an accumulation of small acts.

There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the soul.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

CONVICTIONS are lessons learned from experiences we’d never want to go through again, but wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.

No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you.

Anything that is profoundly energy-shifting - like having a child - is fodder for creative thought. So for me, I welcome it and look straight into it as something to learn from.

At certain junctures in the course of existence, unique moments occur when everyone and everything, even the most distant stars, combine to bring about something that could not have happened before and will never happen again. Few people know how to take advantage of these critical moments, unfortunately, and they often pass unnoticed. When someone does recognize them, however, great things happen in the world.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.

Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.

Every situation has changed me as a person.

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

I feel like I've lived four or five lifetimes.

I've lived through what seems to most - and myself - many lives.

Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

The Paralympic Games is about transforming our perception of the world.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

I did have imprinted on me the idea of trauma that changes things dramatically and suddenly. As a writer, I return to that again and again because it fascinates me, and it's where I come from, in a sense.

Experiences aren't given to us to be 'got over,' otherwise they would hardly be experiences.

When you get to experience something that is outside of your reality, it changes you.

The truth is, everything that has happened in my life... that I thought was a crushing event at the time, has turned out for the better.

I feel like I've lived about three or four different lives.