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Metamorphosis

profound change in body structure during the postembryonic development of an organism

Metamorphosis means a noticeable change in character, appearance, function or condition, a transformation, such as that of magic or by sorcery. In biological process Metamorphosis is specific to animal’s physical development after birth or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal's body structure through cell growth and differentiation. In pathology it means a change in the structure of a specific body tissue. Metramorphosis is its derived term.

Life cycle of a mosquito. An adult (imago) lays eggs which develop through several stages to adulthood. Reproduction completes and perpetuates the cycle.


CONTENT : A - F, G - L, M - R, S - Z, See also, External links

Quotes

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Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

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  • When nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted. Once the values of things refer only to their future usefulness, then an infinite withdrawal of value from the living present has begun. Nothing (and nobody) can then exist that is not theoretically replaceable by something (or somebody) more valuable. The country that we (or some of us) had thought to make our home becomes instead 'a nation rich in natural resources'; the good bounty of the land begins its mechanical metamorphosis into junk, garbage, silt, poison, and other forms of 'waste.' "The inevitable result of such an economy is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime's devotion. 'Waste,' in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans--the unborn, the old, 'disinvested' farmers, the unemployed, the 'unemployable.' Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ash heap or the dump.
  • Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened, Happiness never decreases by being shared.
    • Buddha, in “Transformation of Evil”, p. 119.
  • The date had arrived, the idyll was over and my metamorphosis was complete. I was now that impossibly oxymoronic. I was now that impossibly oxymoronic creature: the Public Introvert.
 
Wheat harvest - Arthur C. Clarke: There was nothing left of earth: They had leached away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the sun.
  • There was nothing left of earth: They had leached away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the sun.

G - L

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A depiction from the era of butterfly collection (Carl Spitweg) - Thomas Henry Huxley: In a well-worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former term we take the mental progress of the race.
  • David Banner: When the metamorphosis happens, I don't have any control over it; I don't even know what it DOES! I could have killed you.
Maybe that's why I was wounded. Maybe I tried to kill somebody last night - maybe I DID kill somebody.
  • Few of the university people pen plays well. They smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why! here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye, and Ben Johnson too. O that Ben Johnson’s a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace giving the poet’s a pill; but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him betray his credit.

M - R

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Chris McCubbin: The fungus has been Planet's dominant life form since about the time of the Lower Paleozoic on Earth. But when, once every hundred million years or so, the neural net at last achieves the critical mass necessary to become sentient, the final metamorphosis kills off most of the other life on the planet.
 
Destruction of Leviathan. 1865 engraving by Gustave Doré
  • I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.
 
Butterfly and Chinese wisteria flowers.- Octavio Paz:We pursue her in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air...
  • We pursue her in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.
  • Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon.

S - Z

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Butterfly Life Cycle
  • ...an evolutionary elaboration of the molting phenomenon, is called metamorphosis. Butterflies have what is called complete Metamorphosis: a larva, or a caterpillar, becomes a pupa, and the pupa becomes an adult butterfly. Hatching from the egg is not a molt; the larva simply grows inside the egg and chews its way out. Larvae molt (typically three to five times) to bigger larvae, the mature larva molts to a pupa; the pupa molts just once, to an adult, and the adult, which might live only a week, neither grows not molts.
  • I do not yearn for the cloud for I am not the rain. I am the sheer cloud itself, without whose presence there is no existence of rain.
  • As technology progresses, an SDR can move to an almost total SR, where the digitization is at (or very near to) the antenna and all of the processing required for the radio is performed by software residing in high-speed digital signal processing elements... It is evident from inspection of these... that there is a key transition stage in the metamorphosis of SDR to SR. This metamorphosis is a function of core technology advances balanced against the full scope of design criteria and constraints applied to the wireless product.
  • A man, who is constantly engaged in action and works hard until he has achieved his goal undergoes lots of metamorphosis and positive change which helps in his self improvement.
  • Initially I observed, in sweeping, panoramic vision, a perpetually metamorphosing Persian rug. A few minutes later these patterns segued into cinematic images from childhood—it was kind of like watching home movies.
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Wiktionary
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