Metamorphosis

"I am, a spectator, so to speak of the molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis; an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me – and this phenomenology of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery of the world."

"When nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted. Once the values of things refer only to their future usefulness, then an infinite withdrawal of value from the living present has begun. Nothing (and nobody) can then exist that is not theoretically replaceable by something (or somebody) more valuable. The country that we (or some of us) had thought to make our home becomes instead 'a nation rich in natural resources'; the good bounty of the land begins its mechanical metamorphosis into junk, garbage, silt, poison, and other forms of 'waste.' "The inevitable result of such an economy is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime's devotion. 'Waste,' in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans--the unborn, the old, 'disinvested' farmers, the unemployed, the 'unemployable.' Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ash heap or the dump."

"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened, Happiness never decreases by being shared."

"The date had arrived, the idyll was over and my metamorphosis was complete. I was now that impossibly oxymoronic. I was now that impossibly oxymoronic creature: the Public Introvert."

"There was nothing left of earth: They had leached away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the sun."

"The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakespeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature."

"Metamorphosis and Life Cycle w:ModularityModularity All individuals of the "higher" insects — the butterflies and moths (Lepidopteral), flies and mosquitoes (Dipteral), and wasps, ants, and bees (Hy-menopteral) — along with many amphibians, invertabrates, and fish, undergo drastic change during their life cycles when they metamorphose from larva to adult."

"For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature; the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible."

"In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man’s dispute with madness was dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge"

"It is not only a question of the process of the transformation, but also, that a visible sign is brought out, which points to metamorphosis, ± in the sleep of the dancer as in the sleep of the butterfly..."

"[F]rom left to right as 'something unique in natural history … the first metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug."

"I saw this dude, he was wearing a leather jacket and at the same time he was eating a hamburger and drinking a glass of milk. I said to him "Dude you're a cow, the metamorphosis is complete. Don't fall asleep or I'll tip you over.""

"And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality."

"In the nature of things, I must soon lose sight of this sense of constant metamorphosis whose limits bound our human life."

"In a well-worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former term we take the mental progress of the race."

"David Banner: When the metamorphosis happens, I don't have any control over it; I don't even know what it DOES! I could have killed you."

"Few of the university people pen plays well. They smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why! here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye, and Ben Johnson too. O that Ben Johnson’s a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace giving the poet’s a pill; but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him betray his credit."

"The butterfly's attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign."

"In the film Schindlers List, Oskar Schindler undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis. The film Schindlers List depicts the transformation of its main protagonist, Oskar Schindler, from an opportunist war profiteer to the saviour of over one thousand Jews."

"If the meaning of the text be sought in the changeable meaning of the words composing it is evident that the shapes and attributes of the Government must partake of the changes to which the words and phrases of all living languages are constantly subject. What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense."

"Now, how the fuck did this metamorphosis happen?"

"The fungus has been Planet's dominant life form since about the time of the Lower Paleozoic on Earth. But when, once every hundred million years or so, the neural net at last achieves the critical mass necessary to become sentient, the final metamorphosis kills off most of the other life on the planet."

"I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget."

"It belongs to our Christian faith and not to his stoical virtue, to pretend to this divine and miraculous metamorphosis."

"The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before."

"We pursue her in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence."

"It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality."

"The evolution of man-the cycle of going from dust to desert, the metamorphosis from being the ruler of a planet, to an ingredient in ..."

"The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are."

"I must confess it was very unexpected and I am very startled at my metamorphosis into a chemist."

"Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon."

"...an evolutionary elaboration of the molting phenomenon, is called metamorphosis. Butterflies have what is called complete Metamorphosis: a larva, or a caterpillar, becomes a pupa, and the pupa becomes an adult butterfly. Hatching from the egg is not a molt; the larva simply grows inside the egg and chews its way out. Larvae molt (typically three to five times) to bigger larvae, the mature larva molts to a pupa; the pupa molts just once, to an adult, and the adult, which might live only a week, neither grows not molts."

"I do not yearn for the cloud for I am not the rain. I am the sheer cloud itself, without whose presence there is no existence of rain."

"As technology progresses, an SDR can move to an almost total SR, where the digitization is at (or very near to) the antenna and all of the processing required for the radio is performed by software residing in high-speed digital signal processing elements... It is evident from inspection of these... that there is a key transition stage in the metamorphosis of SDR to SR. This metamorphosis is a function of core technology advances balanced against the full scope of design criteria and constraints applied to the wireless product."

"A man, who is constantly engaged in action and works hard until he has achieved his goal undergoes lots of metamorphosis and positive change which helps in his self improvement."

"Anarchism is a creed inspired and ridden by paradox, and thus, while its advocates theoretically reject tradition, they are nevertheless very much concerned with the ancestry of their doctrine. This concern springs from the belief that anarchism is a manifestation of natural human urges, and that it is the tendency to create authoritarian institutions which is the transient aberration. If one accepts this view, then anarchism cannot merely be a phenomenon of the present; the aspect of it we perceive in history is merely one metamorphosis of an element constant in society."