Becoming Quotes

“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

“For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“No one knows what you have been through or what your pretty little eyes have seen, but I can reassure you ~ whatever you have conquered, it shines through your mind.”
― Nikki Rowe

“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“She was like the sun,
She knew her place in the world -
She would shine again regardless
of all the storms and changeable weather
She wouldn't adjust her purpose
for things that pass.”
― Nikki Rowe

“I have lost and loved and won and cried myself to the person I am today.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“We all wind up drawn to what we're afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it.”
― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”
― Joseph Campbell

“We are all butterflies. Earth is our chrysalis.”
― LeeAnn Taylor

“COMING FORTH INTO THE LIGHT

I was born the day
I thought:
What is?
What was?
And
What if?

I was transformed the day
My ego shattered,
And all the superficial, material
Things that mattered
To me before,
Suddenly ceased
To matter.

I really came into being
The day I no longer cared about
What the world thought of me,
Only on my thoughts for
Changing the world.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don't lose yourself at happy hour, but don't lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“To be or not to be?' That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. 'To become more or not to become more' This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe.”
― Truman G. Madsen, Eternal man,

“It is not until you change your identity to match your life blueprint that you will understand why everything in the past never worked.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
― Charles Du Bos

“I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.”
― George MacDonald

“…People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyone is always becoming and unbecoming.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Healing your wounds will hurt, so cry.
Cry your pretty little heart out until you have nothing left to shed, that's how beauty is grown;
through the darkest of our days we become the light.”
― Nikki Rowe

“With good reason, love's messengers, Eros and Kama, are armed with bows and long-distance arrows. No being, god or mortal, can choose love. Love comes despite ourselves; and then, if we have not already done so, we have the task of becoming our selves so we may welcome love.”
― Diane Wolkstein, The First Love Stories: From Isis and Osiris to Tristan and Iseult

“It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or a open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you'd otherwise find beautiful - a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“You can't do everything but you can do something!”
― Jeff Dixon

“It doesn’t take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone’s gaze. It’s not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“I was transformed the day
My ego shattered,
And all the superficial, material
Things that mattered
To me before,
Suddenly ceased
To matter.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“It is easy to do good, but it takes a lifetime to become human!”
― AainaA-Ridtz A R

“Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.”
― Gordon W. Allport, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality

“Become a dignitary by treating others with dignity.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“I should still, paradoxical as it may sound, like to maintain the opposite valuation of the dream in relation to the mysterious foundation of our being, whose phenomena we are. The more aware I become of these omnipotent art impulses in nature, and find in them an ardent longing for illusion and for redemption by illusion, the more I feel compelled to make the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent, the primal Oneness, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the delightful vision, the pleasurable illusion for its constant redemption: an illusion that we, utterly caught up in it and consisting of it—as a continuous becoming in time, space and causality, in other words—are required to see as empirical reality.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Where achievements and fulfillments dwell, there emptiness its grey clouds sends. For man is mostly alive and satisfied during the period of his toil. Not by being, but by becoming. A passionate denizen of the kingdom of the Potential.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Some people took the expression, you can be anything you want to be, too literal. You don't just wake up and become without becoming. You must do the work.”
― Niedria D. Kenny