Themes

"The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames? What about those devoured by the flames within them?"

"I became a spiritual ballerina. I was as graceful as a swan or any professional ballerina that danced professionally. The prayer card remained in my hand and it went on a wild ride as my hand would sway this way and that. I was so overwhelmed by what the Spirit was doing through me that I could only weep."

"Betula albosinensis Chinese Birch, ultimately makes a 15 metre (50ft) graceful tree with glossy green leaves turning golden yellow in the autumn."

"Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful."

"The swan is somewhat like a duck but much more graceful and wonderful than a duck."

"Gracefulness is an idea not very different from beauty; it consists of much the same things. Gracefulness is an idea belonging to posture and motion. In both these, to be graceful, it is requisite that there be no appearance of difficulty; there is required a small inflection of the body; and a composure of the parts in such a manner, as not to encumber each other, not to appear divided by sharp and sudden angles. In this ease, this roundness, this delicacy of attitude and motion, it is that all the magic of grace consists, and what is called its je ne sçai quoi; as will be obvious to any observer, who considers attentively the Venus de Medicis, the Antinous, or any statue generally allowed to be graceful in an high degree."

"There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness."

"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning."

"Words to intrigue, inspire, examine, question, praise; Words to help us appreciate our world, our selves, our games; Words to dance our true soul fires gracefully free."

"The cello is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older, but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful."

"Dancing as education, understood by the Greeks, today is coming to the fore again. With limbs less supple, but more powerful than a woman's, a male dancer's virile leaps are every bit as graceful as a ballerina's."

"Gracefulness has been defined to be the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul."

"Women wish to be loved without a why or a wherefore; not because they are pretty, or good, or well-bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves."

"Eagles: When they walk, they stumble. They are not what one would call graceful. They were not designed to walk. They fly. And when they fly, oh, how they fly, so free, so graceful. They see from the sky what we never see."

"Everyone is like a butterfly, they start out ugly and awkward and then morph into beautiful graceful butterflies that everyone loves."

"Gracefulness is not imposed from without but generated from within. Gracefulness is 'the immateriality which . . . passes into matter.' In this formulation, the soul, or what Bergson elsewhere calls the élan vital, the life force, shapes the matter that contains it. The soul is not immobilized by matter, as it is in comedy, but remains infinitely supple and perpetually in motion."

"She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table."

"So you're trying to make her happy despite the fact that the reason she'd unhappy in the first place is you," said Simon not very kindly. "That seems contradictory, doesn't it?" "Love is a contradiction," said Jace, and turned back to the window."

"Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know? If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity."

"A gymnast can be as graceful as a ballerinaand as appealing as a model in a perfume ad."

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

"At three years old it [Palm Tree] begins to bear long bunches of orange-coloured fruit, which, contrasting with the deep rich hue of the leaves, adds the charm of colour to that of gracefulness of form."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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.""

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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..."