Transitional Quotes & Sayings

Life is eternal but death is ephemeral and transitional. — Debasish Mridha

We have to look at for example the increasing globalization of capital, the whole system of transitional capitalism now which has had an impact on black populations - that has for example eradicated large numbers of jobs that black people traditionally have been able to count upon and created communities where the tax base is lost now as a result of corporations moving to the third world in order to discover cheap labor. — Angela Davis

The reason we don't know what happens for sure when we die is that if you knew, you would essentially have nothing to live for. Your life would be nothing more than a transitional period, which it is, but because of the fact that we don't know when, how and why death exists, we can spend less time worrying about death itself and rather focus on our borrowed time on earth. — Juri Hansen

I definitely have friends who - they've gone to multiple jobs, they've had trouble finding jobs, some have gone back to school - it's a very transitional period in anyone's life. I think definitely people have, even like my girlfriend for example, she works her job - and just the fact that she has a job - she just feels super lucky in this economy. But it can really shape, I think, the way you view the world. — Chris Baio

Biochemists assume that the three cellular kingdoms evolved from a single common ancestor, because the alternative of supposing an independent origin of life two or more times presents still greater difficulties. The common ancestor is merely hypothetical, as are the numerous transitional intermediate forms that would have to connect such enormously different groups to the ancestor. From a Darwinist viewpoint all these hypothetical creatures are a logical necessity, but there is no empirical confirmation that they existed. — Phillip E. Johnson

Look there are going to be, there are already adjustment processes in place but the point is that you'll actually make them work and get satisfactory outcomes if there's decent burden sharing along the way. If there's, if you like a proper transitional assistance. — John Anderson

I like Fall, tending to prefer the transitional seasons, because they don't have weather, just foreshadowing. It's not cold yet, but it's getting colder. You look hippest in this weather, dressed in your faux-proletariat thrift store jacket and long pants to hide your dorky knees. Fall seems pregnant with the possibility of simpler things, a straight-forward future. — Al Burian

Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation. — Carl Sagan

Adolescence was only recognised as a life stage in the early 20th century, when psychologists got down to work. Today's generational battle obscures the fact that adulthood is happening later. A new transitional stage has emerged after adolescence: the twenties. — Jane Ridley

Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of nature's process. — Sri Aurobindo

The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem ... — Anna Julia Cooper

The transitional concept of management is reaching the end of the road. — Michael Martin Hammer

And I guess, I guess it's a humanist film. It's not really a spiritual film and it's, you know, it's saying that we're all one tribe of humans and we're on this little rock, floating through the universe and (Amenabar) has these (transitional shots of) POVs where you see humans like ants. — Rachel Weisz

Anytime that is 'betwixt and between' or transitional is the faeries' favorite time. They inhabit transitional spaces: the bottom of the garden, existing in a space between manmade cultivation and wilderness. Look for them in the space between nurture and nature, they are to be found at all boarders and boundaries, or on the edges of water where it is neither land nor lake, neither path nor pond. They come when we are half-asleep. They come at moments when we least expect them; when our rational mind balances with the fluid irrational. — Brian Froud

The message is that no matter how stuck we feel, we are always moving, and transforming. All difficult moments are transitional times, we are always evolving, and becoming the next version of ourselves. We just need to know that and stick it out. — Cecelia Ahern

The landscape, like Los Angeles itself, is transitional. Impermanence haunts the city, with its mushroom industries
the aircraft perpetually becoming obsolete, the oil which must one day be exhausted, the movies which fill America's theatres for six months and are forgotten. Many of its houses
especially the grander ones
have a curiously disturbing atmosphere, a kind of psychological dankness which smells of anxiety, overdrafts, uneasy lust, whisky, divorce and lies. — Christopher Isherwood

I like the fact that I have two names because I find that in this industry you have to have dual personalities [especially] being a transitional entertainer [being an actor going into music]. It's not that I'm pretending to be somebody else but it's just that the people that I act with, the Directors, Producers and Agents, can't really relate to what I talk about. — Drake

Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past. — Gilbert Adair

Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And 'Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll' was a very transitional film for me in that I was one of the producers and you know, came up with the idea with the writer and the producer, as well. But, it was a very collaborative event. You know, I really love working in that way. — Andy Serkis

It's a scary question for a musician or songwriter today - what does the future hold? It is a strange time in the music business too; it feels like we are all in some kind of transitional period, stuck between old technology and new. — Dean Wareham

Great ages and great individuals have arisen from the breakdown of a rigid system: the rigid system has given the necessary discipline and coherence, while its breakdown has releaed the necessary energy. ( ... ) No doubt the ideal is a certain rigidity of action plus a certain plasticity of thought, but this is diffcult to achieve in practice except during brief transitional periods. — Bertrand Russell

I did go to Wellesley, a women's college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs. — Madeleine Albright

I have an affection for those transitional seasons, the way they take the edge off the intense cold of winter, or heat of summer. — Whitney Otto

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement. — George Orwell

She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of thinking and writing was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence. — Jane Smiley

Successful entrepreneurs find the balance between listening to their inner voice and staying persistent in driving for success - because sometimes success is waiting right across from the transitional bump that's disguised as failure. — Naveen Jain

The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture. — Eric Allin Cornell

After the death of the sadistic dictator Gen. Sanni Abacha in 1998, Nigeria underwent a one-year transitional military administration headed by Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who uncharacteristically bowed out precisely on the promised date for military disengagement. Did the military truly disengage, however? No. — Wole Soyinka

In its essence, the transitional stage of Shifting is when we wonder if maybe there is much more to the spiritual life than we've ever been taught, if the wild ways of Jesus are even really possible, or if we could possibly find life outside of going to church. We start dreaming of a place or way we could use our creativity and gifts without being controlled by the church or someone else's leadership. We long to engage in more meaningful relationships instead of superficial ones. We want to spend time hanging out with our neighbors instead of only church people (and without any kind of evangelism agenda). While desires look different for each of us, Shifting is about no longer feeling comfortable in our spiritual skin. — Kathy Escobar

We made certain that there were decent transitional arrangements to get us to where we wanted to go. The same principle will have to apply here or we won't get there. — John Anderson

Divide the world into regional groups as a transitional stage to world government. Populations will more readily abandon their national loyalty to a vague regional loyalty than they will for a world authority. Later the regions can be brought together all the way into a single world dictatorship. — Joseph Stalin

Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms. — Charles Darwin

Legally, Moosbrugger's case could be summed up in-a sentence. He
was one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine
known even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility.
These unfortunates typically suffer not only substandard health
but also have a substandard disease, Nature has a peculiar prefer-
ence for producing such people in droves. Natura non fecit saltus,
she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions; even on the
grand scale she keeps the world in a transitional state between imbe-
cility and sanity. — Robert Musil

I'm of Neil Young's generation. Neil Young's songs have spoken to what it's like to be at least a white male of his generation over the years. Endlessly, he's sung about the stuff that I really care about. He's put into words the feelings that hit you at different transitional moments in life. — Jonathan Demme

Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences. — George Gaylord Simpson

As a cosmion incarnating the cells of a new body, New Lights will function as transitional vessels through which transforming energy can renew the divine image in the world, moving postmoderns from one state of embodiment to another. — Leonard Sweet

Ours is an age between worldviews, creative yet disoriented, a transitional era when the old cultural vision no longer holds and the new has not yet constellated. Yet we are not without signs of what the new might look like — Richard Tarnas

If the Earth were as old as a person, a typical organism would be born, live and die in a sliver of a second. We are fleeting, transitional creatures, snowflakes fallen on the hearth fire. — Carl Sagan

The transitional nature of the 1920's can also be discerned in what may be labeled a new kind of 'dvoeverie' (or dual faith), a syncretistic belief that combined peasant ways and new Communist practices in tentative and uneasy assimilation. For example, there were reports of portraits of Lenin or Kalinin turning up in icon corners and of habit-ridden old peasants crossing themselves in front of these holy images. — Lynne Viola

It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance. — Bell Hooks

It's kind of like trying to make straight lines from curves, but involving shapes that sort of dictate what the curves are, if you like, and the difference between two separate pieces creates a third transitional piece if you like. — Sean Booth

A mother and daughter are an edge.
Edges are ecotones, transitional zones,
places of danger or opportunity.
House-dwelling tension.
When I stand on the edge of the land and sea,
I feel this tension, this fluid line of transition.
High tide. Low tide.
It is the sea's reach and retreat
that reminds me
we have been human
for only a very short time. — Terry Tempest Williams

The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project. — Philip Yancey

The cell phone has become the adult's transitional object, replacing the toddler's teddy bear for comfort and a sense of belonging. — Margaret Heffernan

Sometimes transitional periods in life leave you feeling like a great big jumble of loose, split ends. — Brandi L. Bates

At liminality, at a transitional point between his last night dream and reality, he realizes he has made a big mistake and happiness is possible without death. (Coming back to himself.) — Lara Biyuts

Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage. — Lester Bangs

Sadly, semi-consciousness, along with daydreaming, is a capacity that is actively discouraged among children in schools, and our society is much poorer and harsher as a consequence. The value of liminal space and transitional imagination remain personally and culturally undeveloped. — Michael Leunig

Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognised free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable. — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Transitional periods in life are unsettling because a person's latent fears constantly whisper warnings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Here's the thing with the costumes for 'Mommy': Given the background and social strata that the characters come from, you can't really imagine that they've gone shopping lately, so we went for that very normcore, fashionless era in history, the early 2000s, which was completely transitional. — Xavier Dolan

We modern Marxists regard socialism as a historically brief transitional stage between feudalism and capitalism, necessary only in backward countries. — John McCarthy

These past years have been really transitional for me in every aspect - personally, emotionally and professionally. I was excited and nervous and anxious because I literally had nothing to fall back on. This is my own thing, it's all me. I spent a year working on the record and really wanted to spend time on what it was going to represent and how it was going to represent me in this time in my life — Selena Gomez

Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are. — Osamu Dazai

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible. — Andrew O'Hagan

And the university's reputation will only continue to grow as stories like Elaine's are spread. Delaware State University's motto 'a past to honor, a future to insure,' couldn't be any more fitting for this transitional period you are going through. — Michael N. Castle

The transitional period was tough, I won't kid you. You go from a certain family dynamic to adjusting to a completely new one. It took a few months for us all to fi nd our feet. — Donna Air

I don't see myself as having made the transition. I aim to be more transient than transitional. Life is constantly changing, now at a rate faster than ever, so being in a transitory state is the best way to keep pace. — Marc Forster

Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. — Stephen Jay Gould

There are basically three types of songs: loved songs, unloved songs, and transitional songs written by tired people in between the two. Love songs are cheesy, unloved songs are depressing, and transitional songs are poetry. Transitions catch the world on fire, touching on relevant topics while speaking with giddiness and despair of the lover between. — Ace Boggess

Evil is the radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is amere appearance; what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes. — Franz Kafka

Maybe the word welfare should be changed to something of, 'a transitional living fund.' For that is what it is - for people to be able to live. — Sheila Jackson Lee

There is a confusing dual structure in the relationship of the individual to history. Even the sensory certainties of suffering follow a predictable order of physical reactions, so that the undeniable reality of their dizziness, queasiness, or nausea can be regarded with equal plausibility as the hysterical symptoms of a transitional period - a hypochondria of the epoch and not of individual people. — Andreas Bernard

Support for shelters and transitional living and housing programs is necessary if we are going to change the landscape for homeless boys and girls in America. — Jewel

You are a transitional generation, said Aunt Lydia. It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts.
She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way.
She said: Because they won't want things they can't have. — Margaret Atwood

I know this may sound like an excuse," he said. "But tensor functions in higher differential topology, as exemplified by application of the Gauss-Bonnett Theorem to Todd Polynomials, indicate that cohometric axial rotation in nonadiabatic thermal upwelling can, by random inference derived from translational equilibrium aggregates, array in obverse transitional order the thermodynamic characteristics of a transactional plasma undergoing negative entropy conversions."
"Why don't you just shut up," said Hardesty. — Mark Helprin

There are two perspectives on the oil sands. You have companies that want to make it the next Saudi Arabia. The other is that it's a transitional resource to a low-carbon economy, and to regard it as anything else is to drain the continent's financial resources. — Andrew Nikiforuk

Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence. — Stephen Jay Gould

I like youth, and I like stories about feeling things intensely and about transitional moments in human life. I reflect on my life and that's just a moment when I felt things probably the most intensely. — Joseph McGinty Nichol

We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. — Michael Shermer

There are transitional forms between the metals and non-metals; between chemical combinations and simple mixtures, between animals and plants, between phanerogams and cryptogams, and between mammals and birds [ ... ]. The improbability may henceforth be taken for granted of finding in Nature a sharp cleavage between all that is masculine on the one side and all that is feminine on the other; or that any living being is so simple in this respect that it can be put wholly on one side, or wholly on the other, of the line. — Otto Weininger

We postpone the finality of heartbreak by clinging to hope. Though this might be acceptable during early or transitional stages of grief, ultimately it is no way to live. We need both hands free to embrace life and accept love, and that's impossible if one hand has a death grip on the past. — Kristin Armstrong

A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is important to note that a transitional phase has to be uncomfortable for you to move on to the next stage, lest procrastination stymies you. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Shock therapy has arguably created a large block of politicized people ready to vote for someone, perhaps a militarist, a quasifascist, or an old-style Communist, to undo the transitional order that has harmed them. — Russell Hardin

In our era, just as in every transitional age, God seems dead, but it is really our Enlightenment culture that has died. — Robert Inchausti

From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. — Gertrude Stein

I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a transitional area that was surrounded by farmland that wasn't being cultivated. — James Balog

A world like that is not really natural, or (the thought strikes one later) perhaps it really is, only more so. Parts of it are neither land nor sea and so everything is moving from one element to another, wearing uneasily the queer transitional bodies that life adopts in such places. Fish, some of them, come out and breathe air and sit about watching you. Plants take to eating insects, mammals go back to the water and grow elongate like fish, crabs climb trees. Nothing stays put where it began because everything is constantly climbing in, or climbing out, of its unstable environment. — Loren Eiseley

I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution. — John Maynard Keynes

It was still late summer elsewhere, but here, high in Appalachia, fall was coming; for the last three mornings, she'd been able to see her breath.
The woods, which started twenty feet back from her backdoor like a solid wall, showed only hints of the impending autumn. A few leaves near the treetops had turned, but most were full and green. Visible in the distance, the Widow's Tree towered above the forest. Its leaves were the most stubborn, tenaciously holding on sometimes until spring if the winter was mild. It was a transitional period, when the world changed its cycle and opened a window during which people might also change, if they had the inclination. — Alex Bledsoe

I have all the support I need to simply relax and be with the transitional, in-process quality of my life. I have all I need to engage in the process of awakening. — Pema Chodron

January 30th will be a historic day for the Middle East and the world. The Iraqi people will take the next step toward a free and democratic society as they place their votes for a transitional Iraqi government. — Dana Rohrabacher

I am always interested in characters who are in these kinds of transitional moments in their lives, when it's not clear where they're going to end up. It's interesting territory for fiction. — K.M. Soehnlein

You have to get off that finite road that you've created from your transitional standpoint and onto the path of light. Onto the infinite road of eternal existence, the firm foundation of truth. This is where the crooked becomes straight, the lost get found, the blind see, and the dead live. Where the tangible reasoning of logical man loses credibility and is proven unrealistic. Where faith becomes active and the world of the supernatural becomes obvious. You have to accept Jesus. Accept it, accept Jesus. — Calvin W. Allison

A transitional government is the beginning of a transfer of sovereignty. It's a question of Iraqi security and moving forward with the political process. — Joschka Fischer

I think what we're going to ultimately recognize is that capitalism was a transitional and immature system. It got the planet to be globalized and now something else has to emerge. We have to be the ones. We can't wait around. Nobody else is going to do it for us. We have to be the ones who create that new emerging system. — Daniel Pinchbeck

Now we do have many examples of transitional sequences. — George Gaylord Simpson

But I started it when I was going through a transitional time in my life. At the end of it, it really sort of symbolized it. I had made room to change, and room to grow. I recorded it in a little room. — Katey Sagal

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. — Soren Kierkegaard

In the past, we had objects to believe in - objects of belief. These have disappeared. But we also had objects not to believe in, which is just as vital a function. Transitional objects, ironic ones, so to speak, objects of our indifference, ... Ideologies played this role reasonably well. These, too, have disappeared. And we survive only by a reflex action of collective credulity, which consists not only in absorbing everything put about under the heading of news or information, but in believing in the principal and transcendence of information. — Jean Baudrillard

Physical death is a transitional step in the total life process. The soul, which does not die, having finished with the Earthly body, moves to a higher level of life, where it grows under greatly enhanced circumstances. — Sandra Champlain

The several difficulties here discussed, namely our not finding in the successive formations infinitely numerous transitional links between the many species which now exist or have existed; the sudden manner in which whole groups of species appear in our European formations; the almost entire absence, as at present known, of fossiliferous formations beneath the Silurian strata, are all undoubtedly of the gravest nature. — Charles Darwin

The argument from absence of transitional types boils down to the striking fact that such types are always lacking unless they have been found. — George Gaylord Simpson

No, not of course at all - it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that 'of course'; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke - that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you're being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not 'straight ahead' but 'merry-go-round'! — Thomas Mann

The Enlightenment, finally, invented progressive 'history' as an inner-worldly purgatory in order to develop the conditions of possibility of a perfected 'society'. This provided the required setting for the aggressive social theology of the Modern Age to drive out the political theology of the imperial eras. What was the Enlightenment in its deep structure if not an attempt to translate the ancient rhyme on learning and suffering - mathein pathein - into a collective and species-wide phenomenon? Was its aim not to persuade the many to expose themselves to transitional ordeals that would precede the great optimization of all things? — Peter Sloterdijk

We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a "transitional object"
a baby's warm blanket for adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom. — Stephen Jay Gould