"Transfigure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that heavenly message made the country to which it came the Holy Land. And the believing of that message, to-day, will lead any child of man into the kingdom of heaven. And the keeping of that faith, the following of that Life, will transfigure any country beneath the blue sky ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... catching cold," he said quickly, his whole face brightening with a sudden tenderness that seemed to transfigure the dark features. "I am keeping you here when you should be changing your clothes. Go, I beg you, ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the servants of the lord, does it?" laughed Joseph. "They cannot forgive me for selling it to the banker Flies, to transfigure into a Jewish palace!—Well, let us see ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... so certain ideas naturally awaken the energies of loyalty, courage, endurance, or devotion. When these ideas are effective in an individual's life, their effect is often very great indeed. They may transfigure it, unlocking innumerable powers which, but for the idea, would never have come into play. "Fatherland," "the Flag," "the Union," "Holy Church," "the Monroe Doctrine," "Truth," "Science," "Liberty," Garibaldi's ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... change, alter, vary, wax and wane; modulate, diversify, qualify, tamper with; turn, shift, veer, tack, chop, shuffle, swerve, warp, deviate, turn aside, evert, intervert[obs3]; pass to, take a turn, turn the corner, resume. work a change, modify, vamp, superinduce; transform, transfigure, transmute, transmogrify, transume[obs3]; metamorphose, ring the changes. innovate, introduce new blood, shuffle the cards; give a turn to, give a color to; influence, turn the scale; shift the scene, turn over a new leaf. recast &c. 146; reverse &c. 218; disturb ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... enough, though in the most commonplace themes, such as Dejeuner and The Box—both have been exhibited in New York—the luminous envelope, the gorgeous riot of opposed tones, the delicious dissonances literally transfigure the themes. In his second manner his affinities to Claude Monet and impressionism are more marked. His landscapes are more atmospheric, division of tones inevitably practised. Everything swims in aerial tones. His portraits, once his only means of subsistence, are the personification ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... much grows 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 ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... two people who were both in their different quality so good. But goodness that is narrow is a pedestrian and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my father seems to me one of the essentially tragic things that have come to me personally, one of those things that nothing can transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I cannot soothe with any explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed the most lovable of weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained in a hard and narrow system that made evil out of many things not in the least evil, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... They are the essential conditions of the Christian man. They constitute his inmost and necessary character. They do not, however, supersede or render superfluous the other virtues. On the contrary they transmute and transfigure them, giving to them at once ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the Mayor as he was speaking, and as Farnham caught the look, a smile broke over his face, one of those powerful smiles that transfigure the ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... adequately 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, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... at 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
... or being good, will fail in one case or another case, because they do not take possession of a man's whole heart, but only of some part of his heart. Love—love to Christ, can alone sweep away a man's whole heart and soul with it, and renew it, and transfigure it, and make it strong instead of weak, pure instead of foul, gentle instead of fierce, brave instead of being vain and cowardly, and fearing what everyone will say of him. Only love for Christ, who loved all men unto the death, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... discovers analogies and 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 was shaped out of chaos, by words the Christian religion was established ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... of flame licked the broad colonnade of the National Hotel, and shot a wreathing pillar of fire and smoke high into the air, M'liss extended her tiny fist and shook it at the burning building with an inspiration that at the moment seemed to transfigure her. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... two were sitting there in quietness of joy, when my father came up to see his patient. Mr. Axtell was with him. They went in; indifferent words were spoken,—until, was it Abraham Axtell that I saw as I kept up my walking in the hall? What mysterious change had come to transfigure his face so that I scarcely believed the evidence of my own eyes? He came to the door and said, "Will you come in, Miss Percival?" I obeyed his request. He closed the door, and turned ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... joyless years went on, like the bony structure of her face as the softness of youth left it. She was saved from that, whatever was to be her destiny in Italy. From South Bradfield to Venice,—what a prodigious transition! It seemed as if it must transfigure her. "Miss Blood," he exclaimed, "I wish I could be with you ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... love be best, it is not all. It is here to transfigure all; we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. For life calls us, even from our love. The day is long and we must work in it; but we can meet when the day is done. In the light of this low half-moon ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... 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 ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... all right," he said. "Let us hurry to the Custom House. An hour in your company, Geraldine, will transfigure even the ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... us, invisible, yet audible through the clamour of voices near us. And so On the Eve, the work of a poet, has certain deep notes, which break through the harmonious tenor of the whole, and strangely and swiftly transfigure the quiet story, troubling us with a dawning consciousness of the march of mighty events. Suddenly a strange sense steals upon the reader that he is living in a perilous atmosphere, filling his heart with foreboding, and enveloping at ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... the wondrous sheen and ripple of hair, as with an aureole of poetry; it was also less necessary to Giorgione and Titian, who could hide coarse limbs beneath their draperies of precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of their palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess. But even the Lombards, even the Venetians, required the antique influence. They could not perhaps have obtained it direct like the Tuscans: the colourists and masters of light and shade ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... slender figure in her youth, and her physiognomy, 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 ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... shall I hope to be forgiven? Yet let me not be judged as one Who mocks at any high behest; My fault being that I kept the throne Of a JOVE vacant in my breast, And when APOLLO claimed the place I was too loyal to my Jove; Unmindful how the masks of love Transfigure all things ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... 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 would fail ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... insight to translate, transpose and transfigure this mournful object of pity into an exalted, dignified personage, worthy our worship as the mother of the race, are to be congratulated as having a share of the occult mystic ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... 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 ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... protest against the red ruin of war. The flames roll on; they reach the stone walls of a cattle pen, and leap it as a hunter takes a brush fence in his stride; onward still, until a Kaffir kraal is reached. The soft-lipped billows kiss the uncouth mud wall, and for a moment transfigure them with a nameless beauty, the beauty that precedes ruin. Only a moment or two, and then the resistless destroyer flaunts its pennons amidst the reed-thatched roofs; the sparks leap up, the black smoke curls towards the sky, whilst on the neighbouring ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... 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 ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... exchange, shift, transmute, commute, metamorphose, substitute, turn, convert, modify, transfigure, vary, diversify, qualify, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... not much real beauty, perhaps, in it, only long, white dusty roads and straight rows of formal poplars; but, now and then, some little breaking gleam of broken light would lend to the grey field and the silent barn a secret and a mystery that were hardly their own, would transfigure for one exquisite moment the peasants passing down through the vineyard, or the shepherd watching on the hill, would tip the willows with silver and touch the river into gold; and the wonder of the effect, with the strange simplicity of the material, always seemed to ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... them here to-night, and would the Master but enter as when upon earth, surely he would look upon them in tender pity; would bless them; would take in his arms those whom the world has cast aside and overlooked. Nay, perhaps he would transfigure their actuality into their possibility, and we might see "the angels in their faces," pleading with us before the ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... 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 ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... contrary, Augustine says (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 His ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... hollow, but the upper part is superb. Her brow is low and broad, and she folds back from it the heavy waves of her black hair in the plainest possible style. Her eyes are her chief beauty, and would transfigure any face into loveliness. They are very large, and of a dark, transparent blue, of so lustrous and so perfect an azure that not even in shadow do they look black. Stay—I can give you a better idea of her ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... 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 ...
— Lost - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... appearing in three or four favoured nations, in comparatively a short period of time. May we be allowed to imagine the minds of men everywhere working together during many ages for the completion of our knowledge? May not the increase of knowledge transfigure the world?—JOWETT, Plato, i. 414. Nothing, I believe, is so likely to beget in us a spirit of enlightened liberality, of Christian forbearance, of large-hearted moderation, as the careful study of the history of doctrine and the history of interpretation.—PEROWNE, ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... Japan. The night is velvety; and the moonlight and the starlight transfigure the dolls' house architecture, the warped pine-trees, the feathery bamboo clumps ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace, such as no practised art of external manners could have attained. It was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected afterwards, seemed to transfigure ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
