Change and Transformation

What would have happened if she hadn’t lost the necklace? Who knows? Who knows? How strange life is, how full of changes! How little it takes to doom you or save you!

Nothing is more difficult to transact, nor more dubious to succeed, nor more dangerous to manage, than to make oneself chief to introduce new orders. Because the introducer has for enemies all those whom the old orders benefit, and has for lukewarm defenders all those who might benefit by the new orders.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become.

The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

Love is more afraid of change than destruction.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

I teach you beyond Man (superman). Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.

When virtue has slept, it will arise again all the fresher.

Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.

The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.

We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don't throw out the best part of ourselves.

Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.Those whom I deemedChanged to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,Have aged and lost our old affinity:One has to change to stay akin to me.

O my brothers, I dedicate and direct you to a new nobility: you shall become procreators and cultivators and sowers of the future — verily, not to a nobility that you might buy like shopkeepers and with shopkeepers' gold: for whatever has its price has little value. Not whence you came shall henceforth constitute your honor, but whither you are going! Your will and your foot which has a will to go over and beyond yourselves — that shall constitute your new honor.

Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.

The brain's transmutation begins when consciousness understands that it made everything up – morality, good and bad, redemption and the truth. With this understanding, it realizes that now it can start anew.

It is the brain's full and absolute responsibility to evolve, nobody will do it for it, and grace and salvation do not exist. The brain must take its place as the source of grace and learn to operate itself properly. In fact, its transformation will begin when it will bear all responsibility alone.

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.