"Transfigure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Wherever the exiled Englishman can find in his new home resemblances to his old one, he is touched to the marrow of his being; the love that is in his heart inspires his imagination, and these allied forces transfigure those resemblances into authentic duplicates of the revered originals. It is beautiful, the feeling which works this enchantment, and it compels one's homage; compels it, and also compels one's assent—compels ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lifted his head toward the light, while he ran his hand through his hair, and again she saw the look, so like spiritual exaltation, transfigure his face. Before this man, who had sprung from poverty and dirt, who had struggled up by his own force, overcoming and triumphing, fighting and winning, fighting and holding, fighting and losing, but always fighting—before this man, who had been born in a cellar, she felt suddenly ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Japan. The night is velvety; and the moonlight and the starlight transfigure the dolls' house architecture, the warped pine-trees, the feathery bamboo ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Salvation are co-extensive? When we once receive the idea that divine love and power have no petty restrictions of place or time, will we not accept the larger theory? And this one conception will transform and transfigure all our thoughts of redemption. I wish some of our Methodist brethren would look into this matter candidly, and say ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... great adventure—looking forward to it both as the crowning event of his life, and as the dawn of a new existence in some novel, enchanted world. It was to bring his triumph, and even more, his release. It was at once to crown him as a hero and chieftain among City men, and transfigure him into a being for whom all City things were an abomination. In his waking hours, the conflict between these aims did not specially force itself upon his attention: he mused upon, and spun fancies about, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... discouragements, the suffering and privation of daily living, strenuous enough to overcome and rectify the impulses which make for greed and self-indulgence, should be able, even under untoward conditions, to lift up and transfigure those who are really within its grasp and set them in marked contrast to those who are merely playing a game with it or using it for gain. But what has happened to these wretched girls? Why has this beneficent current cast them upon the shores of death and destruction ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... twilight may deepen and harden As nightward the stream of it runs Till starshine transfigure a garden Whose radiance responds to the sun's: The light of the love of thee darkens The lights that arise and that set: The love that forgets thee ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... me one of His brethren? Let me leisurely think upon it, until my very soul moves amid my affairs in noble and hallowed dignity. If I steadily remember "who I am," it will assuredly transfigure "what I am." I lose the sense of my high kinship, and then I am quite content to be "sent into the fields to ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... million of people who have homes there think so. But take out of it one person, and it would have for you no more interest than any other huge assembly of ugly houses. How, in a lover's eyes, the woman can transfigure a city, a landscape, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... think, of even more value to him, our entire affection. We have heard something of late concerning the "banquet habit," and there are banquets which make it seem to the point. But there are also occasions which transfigure even custom, and make it honored "in the observance." Nor is this a feast of the habitual kind, as concerns its givers, its recipient, and the city in which it is given. The Authors' Club, with many festivals counted in its private annals, now, for the first time, offers a public tribute to one ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... hour of the division of labor, tempestuous winds begin to blow upon humanity. Progress does not improve the condition of all equally and uniformly, although in the end it must include and transfigure every intelligent and industrious being. It commences by taking possession of a small number of privileged persons, who thus compose the elite of nations, while the mass continues, or even buries itself deeper, in barbarism. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Jewish in its cast, though noble and expressive, was so far from being handsome that when at rest the features were almost harsh in their irregularity. But, as in the case of many plain women, emotion and sensibility would quickly transfigure her face into a marvelous beauty and fascination, far beyond the loveliness of line and tint. Her forehead was broad and intellectual, the hair jet-black, the complexion pale, the large, black eyes ardent and full of fire. Her carriage was singularly majestic and easy, and a conscious ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... its obscurities and explain it to itself and by degrees to transform its tendencies and with grace and guidance to give it a steady impulse towards the better things. Confirmation and First Communion sometimes sensibly and even suddenly transfigure a character; but even apart from such choice instances the gradual work of the Sacraments brings Catholic children under a discipline in which the habit of self-examination, the constant necessity for effort, the truthful avowal of being in the ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... the paean of the Marseillaise, the livelier march of Italy, the song of Germany, the Star-Spangled Banner; and long before the band struck into the solemn rhythm of "God save the King," Stella Croyle at all events knew that Calypso had lost. For she saw a flame illumine Luttrell's face and transfigure him. He had slipped out of her reach. The doubts and perplexities which had so troubled him during the last months were now resolved. As he listened to the Hymns, he saw as in a vision the nations advancing abreast over a vast plain like battalions in line with their intervals for manoeuvring spaced ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... Sanitary Inspectors in Ireland could do in twenty; and they could hardly doubt that Our Lady would be delighted. Perhaps they do nowadays; for Ireland is certainly a transfigured country since my youth as far as clean faces and pinafores can transfigure it. In England, where so many of the inhabitants are too gross to believe in poetic faiths, too respectable to tolerate the notion that the stable at Bethany was a common peasant farmer's stable instead of a first-rate racing one, and too savage to believe that anything can really cast ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... falseness and frailty of womankind—all appear as frequently in contemporary collections of sonnets as in Shakespeare's. He borrows very many of his competitors' words and thoughts, but he so fused them with his fancy as often to transfigure them. Genuine emotion or the writer's personal experience very rarely inspired the Elizabethan sonnet, and Shakespeare's sonnets proved no exception to the rule. A personal note may have escaped him involuntarily ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... kept back no longer; they fell not like November rain, but rather like those sudden showers of spring from passing clouds, while the blue sky still looks down, and rainbow smiles transfigure the landscape. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... romancers have very nearly led us to believe a woman does. Yet it is a vital factor upon some occasions, in many natures. There had been times in Thompson's life when the passion Sophie Carr kindled in him seemed a conflagration that must either transfigure or destroy him. It was like a volcano that slept, and ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to help and comfort him. Nevertheless the fact remained that, though he interested her, he did not touch her heart; that remained a closed door to him. But supposing that her friends were right, and that she was too cold by nature ever to feel the ecstasies which transfigure life for some women, should she therefore shut herself out from ordinary domestic joys and interests? Because she was incapable of attaining to the ideal, must the commonplace pleasures of the real also be ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... should not quit the world, to build tabernacles in the Mount of Transfiguration, but come from out the celestial brightness, to shed light into the world,—to make the whole earth a cathedral; to overarch it with Christian ideals, to transfigure its gross and guilty features, and fill it ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... intensity, and, where Ruskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the best words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material controlled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the same radical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as Blake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be said that here again were the best words in the best order. We should then have three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative shaping of the thought ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... beautiful white world. It had been a very mild December and people had looked forward to a green Christmas; but just enough snow fell softly in the night to transfigure Avonlea. Anne peeped out from her frosted gable window with delighted eyes. The firs in the Haunted Wood were all feathery and wonderful; the birches and wild cherry trees were outlined in pearl; the plowed fields were stretches of snowy dimples; and there was a crisp tang ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... everywhere, if we do but wait! Through the swamps we will shape causeways, force purifying drains; we will learn to thread the rocky inaccessibilities; and beaten tracks, worn smooth by mere travelling of human feet, will form themselves. Not a difficulty but can transfigure itself into a triumph; not even a deformity but, if our own soul have imprinted worth on it, will grow dear to us. The sunny plains and deep indigo transparent skies of Italy are all indifferent to the great sick heart of a Sir Walter ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... garden roaming to and fro, Is cause of all my crying and my woe. I *n'ot wher* she be woman or goddess, *know not whether* But Venus is it, soothly* as I guess, *truly And therewithal on knees adown he fill, And saide: "Venus, if it be your will You in this garden thus to transfigure Before me sorrowful wretched creature, Out of this prison help that we may scape. And if so be our destiny be shape By etern word to dien in prison, Of our lineage have some compassion, That is so ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... even to the turn of the neck, the ribbon in the hair, and the light in the blue eyes. So he would turn into the street. Yes, here was the number. Then he rings the bell. She comes to the door. She regards him a moment indifferently. Then amazed recognition, love, happiness, transfigure her face. "Ida!" "Karl!" and he clasps her sobbing to his bosom, from which she shall never ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... water. In winter he was allowed no fire, and he had often to wait till the frozen water in his cell was melted by the sun before he could wash or drink. The vision of the light of the Transfiguration did not transfigure the character ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... living came to! You heard of other people being rapt by splendid sins and splendid virtues, and you anticipated that to-morrow some such majestic energy would transfigure your own living, and change everything: but the great adventure never arrived, somehow; and the days were frittered away piecemeal, what with eating your dinner, and taking a wholesome walk, and checking up your bank account, and dovetailing scraps of ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... des etres; Un seul instant d'amour rouvre l'eden ferme; Un pourceau secouru pese un monde opprime; Viens! le ciel s'offre, avec ses etoiles sans nombre, En fremissant de joie, a l'evade de l'ombre! Viens! tu fus bon un jour, sois a jamais heureux. Entre, transfigure; tes crimes tenebreux, O roi, derriere toi s'effacent dans les gloires; Tourne la tete, et ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... (Contra Maxim. ii, 20): "When Christ says 'Not what I will, but what Thou wilt' He shows Himself to have willed something else than did His Father; and this could only have been by His human heart, since He did not transfigure our weakness into His Divine but into ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... a loss for a reply. He stammered with an embarrassment that quite impressed Leonora; but despite his agitation, he noticed a strange glitter in the girl's eyes, and a mysterious veiling of her voice that seemed to transfigure her. ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pierces behind things to a half-perceived unity of law and essence. In the employ of keen insight, high feeling, and deep thinking, language comes by its own; the prettinesses that may be imposed on a passive material are as nothing to the splendour and grace that transfigure even the meanest instrument when it is wielded by the energy of thinking purpose. The contempt that is cast, by the vulgar phrase, on "mere words" bears witness to the rarity of this serious consummation. Yet by words the world ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... and conceiving things under their true relations. The holy herald of Christ, and Christ himself the finisher of prophecy, made proclamation alike of the same mysterious summons, as a baptism or rite of initiation; namely, Metanoei. Henceforth transfigure your theory of moral truth; the old theory is laid aside as infinitely insufficient; a new and spiritual revelation is established. Metanoeite—contemplate moral truth as radiating from a new centre; apprehend it under ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... in a half methodical, half patient way, as if he were waiting for some revelation it inspired, which was slow that afternoon in coming. At other times it had called up a youthful enthusiasm which was wont to transfigure his grave and prematurely reserved face with a new expression. To-day the revelation and expression were both wanting. He put the letter back with a slight sigh, that sounded so preposterous in the silent room that he could not ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... realised amid the artificial conditions of our present life. The charmed circle of the "Equator's emerald zone," encloses a region of marvel and mystery, where Imagination, the fairy with the magic mirror, helps to interpret and reveal the secrets of Beauty and Truth, which transfigure material form and colour with the halo of idealism. The tale of the mysterious ages when "the threads of families" were first "woven into the ropes of nations," still sways mind and fancy, but the romance of the world continues, though the progress of Humanity varies the pictured page. In the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... it comes about that the political system, in England, at least, is built up piecemeal; it is founded on appetites and compromises, and mortared by immemorial habit. To explain this process, and to transfigure it in the pure light of imagination, was the work of the great poet-politician, Edmund Burke. But the poet usually goes a hastier way to work. Looking at the whole domiciliary structure from outside, he finds ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... give promise of the radiance which shall envelop the earth when the sun shall have arisen in all its splendor, so there comes to us a prophecy of that glorious day when the vision which we are now beholding, which is beaming in the soul of one, shall enter the hearts and transfigure ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... of dull people conscious of deserved prosperity. But just as the sea or a mountain or an adventurous soul will always lend an element of the surprising and romantic to the commonest corner of earth, so the sky will perpetually transfigure large spaces of level country, valley or plain, laid open to its capricious influences. Boars Hill looks over the wide valley of the narrow Og to the downs, and up to where that merges into the ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... ships stand as at gaze To let the marvel by. The grey road glooms . . . Glimmers . . . goes out . . . and there, O there where it fades, What grace, what glamour, what wild will, Transfigure the shadows? Whose, Heart of my heart, Soul of my ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley |
