Patch Adams Quotes

He built a small house, called a cocoon, around himself. He stayed inside for more than two weeks. Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out and... he was a beautiful butterfly!

Out of ugly, make something beautiful.

Maybe one morning I’ll wake up and step outside of myself to look back at the old me lying dead among the sheets.

The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.

A lot of suffering is just getting rid of dross in yourself, and lingering and hanging in the darkness is often - I say this against myself - a failure of imagination, to imagine the door into the light.

Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar.

Our task, in the aftermath of September 11, was and continues to be the transformation of the effects of evil into something beautiful and good.

I love people who really turn their lives around. I think it's such a wonderful human trait.

Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

Eventually this all passes. The public horrors of today eventually blow away. And, yes, you are changed by the awful wake of reckoning they leave behind. Hopefully in the process you don't lose your ability to throw your arms in the air again and spin in wild abandon. That is the ultimate F.U. and - finally - the most beautiful survival tool of all. Don't let them take that away from you.

To a new generation of butterflies, hopefully less stupid than last. Maybe they were burgeoning even now in fat little cocoons. Or maybe not.

We all have within us the ability to move from struggle to grace.

Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concretic layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society...may unexpectedly come forth...to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!...Such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn...Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Sometimes, out of really horrible things come really beautiful things.

True encounter with Christ liberates something in us, a power we did not know we had, a hope, a capacity for life, a resilience, an ability to bounce back when we thought we were completely defeated, a capacity to grow and change, a power of creative transformation.

I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I’d be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

Nothing is written stone, child. Even if it were, the stones can be shattered

I don't know... there's something kind of beautiful about it, don't you think? That we keep living and growing even though our world is a corpse? That we keep coming back no matter how many of us die?

Words are everything. Words give wings even to those who have been stamped upon, broken beyond all hope of repair.

Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.

Satan, the Hinderer, may build a barrier about us, but he can never roof us in, so that we cannot look up.

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.