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If We Wait For Some People To Become Agreeable Or Attractive Before We Begin To Love Them, We Will Never Begin. If We Are Content To Give Them A Cold Impersonal 'charity' That Is Merely A Matter Of Obligation, We Will Not Trouble To Understand Them Or To Sympathize With Them At All. And In That Case We Will Not Really Love Them, Because Love Implies An Efficacious Will Not Only To Do Good To Others Exteriorly But Also To Find Some Good In Them To Which We Can Respond."

-Thomas Merton

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If We Wait For

Thomas Merton

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If We Wait For Some People To Become Agreeable Or Attractive Before We Begin To Love Them, We Will Never Begin. If We Are Content To Give Them A Cold Impersonal 'charity' That Is Merely A Matter Of Obligation, We Will Not Trouble To Understand Them Or To Sympathize With Them At All. And In That Case We Will Not Really Love Them, Because Love Implies An Efficacious Will Not Only To Do Good To Others Exteriorly But Also To Find Some Good In Them To Which We Can Respond."

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We Must Slow Down To A Human Tempo And We’ll Begin To Have Time To Listen.

It Is True To Say That For Me Sanctity Consists In Being Myself And For You Sanctity Consists Of Being Yourself And That, In The Last Analysis, Your Sanctity Will Never Be Mine And Mine Will Never Be Yours, Except In The Communism Of Charity And Grace. For Me To Be A Saint Means To Be Myself. Therefore The Problem Of Sanctity And Salvation Is In Fact The Problem Of Finding Out Who I Am And Of Discovering My True Self.

We Cannot Find Him Unless We Know We Need Him. We Forget This Need When We Take A Self-sufficient Pleasure In Our Own Good Works. The Poor And Helpless Are The First To Find Him, Who Came To Seek And To Save That Which Was Lost.

Pardon All Runners, All Speechless, Alien Winds, All Mad Waters. Pardon Their Impulses, Their Wild Attitudes, Their Young Flights, Their Reticence. When A Message Has No Clothes On How Can It Be Spoken.

Nothing Has Ever Been Said About God That Hasn't Already Been Said Better By The Wind In The Pine Trees.

Before We Can Realize Who We Really Are, We Must Become Conscious Of The Fact That The Person We Think We Are, Here And Now, Is At Best An Impostor And A Stranger.

Every Moment And Every Event Of Every Man's Life On Earth Plants Something In His Soul.

We Stumble And Fall Constantly, Even When We Are Most Enlightened.

Therefore, Doing The Stations Of The Cross Was Still More Laborious Than Consoling, And Required A Sacrifice. It Was Much The Same With All My Devotions. They Did Not Come Easily Or Spontaneously, And They Very Seldom Brought With Them Any Strong Sensible Satisfaction. Nevertheless The Work Of Performing Them Ended In A Profound And Fortifying Peace: A Peace That Was Scarcely Perceptible, But Which Deepened And Which, As My Passions Subsided, Became More And More Real, More And More Sure, And Finally Stayed With Me Permanently.

Despair Is The Absolute Extreme Of Self-love. It Is Reached When A Person Deliberately Turns His Back On All Help From Anyone Else In Order To Taste The Rotten Luxury Of Knowing Himself To Be Lost

You Are Made In The Image Of What You Desire.

Spiritual Awakening

In The End, It's The Reality Of Personal Realtionships That Save Everything.

And It Is In This Darkness, When There Is Nothing Left In Us That Can Please Or Comfort Our Own Minds, When We Seem To Be Useless And Worthy Of All Contempt, When We Seem To Have Failed, When We Seem To Be Destroyed And Devoured, It Is Then That The Deep And Secret Selfishness That Is Too Close To Us For Us To Identify Is Stripped Away From Our Souls. It Is In This Darkness That We Find Liberty. It Is In This Abandonment That We Are Made Strong. This Is The Night Which Empties Us And Makes Us Pure.

What Is The Use Of Praying If At The Very Moment Of Prayer, We Have So Little Confidence In God That We Are Busy Planning Our Own Kind Of Answer To Our Prayer?

The Soul Of Man, Left To Its Own Natural Level, Is A Potentially Lucid Crystal Left In Darkness. It Is Perfect In Its Own Nature, But It Lacks Something That It Can Only Receive From Outside And Above Itself. But When The Light Shines In It, It Becomes In A Manner Transformed Into Light And Seems To Lose Its Nature In The Splendor Of A Higher Nature, The Nature Of The Light That Is In It.

How Do You Expect To Arrive At The End Of Your Own Journey If You Take The Road To Another Man's City?

Love Is...like A Spring Coming Up Out Of The Ground Of Our Own Depths. "i Am Gift." All That I Am Is Something That's Given, And Given Freely. Being Doesn't Cost Anything. There's No Price Tag, No Strings Attached.

We Are Already One. We Just Think We Are Separate.

Whose Silence Are You?

If We Live With Possibilities We Are Exiles From The Present Which Is Given Us By God To Be Our Own, Homeless And Displaced In A Future Or A Past Which Are Not Ours Because They Are Always Beyond Our Reach. The Present Is Our Right Place, And We Can Lay Hands On Whatever It Offers Us.

For Me To Be A Saint Means To Be Myself. Therefore The Problem Of Sanctity And Salvation Is In Fact The Problem Of Finding Out Who I Am And Of Discovering My True Self.

To Be Truly Catholic Is Not Merely To Be Correct According To An Abstractly Universal Standard Of Truth, But Also And Above All To Be Able To Enter Into The Problems And The Joys Of All, To Understand All, To Be All Things To All.

The Whole Function Of The Life Of Prayer Is, Then, To Enlighten And Strengthen Our Conscience So That It Not Only Knows And Perceives The Outward, Written Precepts Of The Moral And Divine Laws, But Above All Lives God's Law In Concrete Reality By Perfect And Continual Union With His Will.

There Is Always A Temptation To Diddle Around In The Contemplative Life, Making Itsy-bitsy Statues.

Contemplative Life

It Is By Desiring To Grow In Love That We Receive The Holy Spirit, And The Thirst For More Charity Is The Effect Of This More Abundant Reception.

Perhaps Peace Is Not, After All, Something You Work For, Or 'fight For.' It Is Indeed 'fighting For Peace' That Starts All The Wars. What, After All, Are The Pretexts Of All These Cold War Crises, But 'fighting For Peace?' Peace Is Something You Have Or Do Not Have. If You Are Yourself At Peace, Then There Is At Least Some Peace In The World. Then Share Your Peace With Everyone, And Everyone Will Be At Peace.

We Cannot Arrive At The Perfect Possession Of God In This Life, And That Is Why We Are Travelling And In Darkness. But We Already Possess Him By Grace, And Therefore In That Sense We Have Arrived And Are Dwelling In The Light. But Oh! How Far Have I To Go To Find You In Whom I Have Already Arrived!

All Men Who Live Only According To Their Five Senses, And Seek Nothing Beyond The Gratification Of Their Natural Appetites For Pleasure And Reputation And Power, Cut Themselves Off From That Charity Which Is The Principle Of All Spiritual Vitality And Happiness Because It Alone Saves Us From The Barren Wilderness Of Our Own Abominable Selfishness.

Music Is Pleasing Not Only Because Of The Sound But Because Of The Silence That Is In It: Without The Alternation Of Sound And Silence There Would Be No Rhythm.

‎"our Job Is To Love Others Without Stopping To Inquire Whether Or Not They Are Worthy.

For The Ones Who Are Called Saints By Human Opinion On Earth May Very Well Be Devils, And Their Light May Very Well Be Darkness

Keeping A Journal Has Taught Me That There Is Not So Much New In Your Life As You Sometimes Think. When You Re-read Your Journal You Find Out That Your Latest Discovery Is Something You Already Found Out Five Years Ago. Still, It Is True That One Penetrates Deeper And Deeper Into The Same Ideas And The Same Experiences.

This Is The Greatest Stumbling Block In Our Spiritual Discipline, Which, In Actuality, Consists Not In Getting Rid Of The Self But In Realizing The Fact That There Is No Such Existence From The First.

...love Triumphs, At Least In This Life, Not By Eliminating Evil Once For All, But By Resisting And Overcoming It Anew Every Day.

Words Stand Between Silence And Silence: Between The Silence Of Things And The Silence Of Our Own Being. Between The Silence Of The World And The Silence Of God. When We Have Really Met And Known The World In Silence, Words Do Not Separate Us From The World Nor From Other Men, Nor From God, Nor From Ourselves Because We No Longer Trust Entirely In Language To Contain Reality.

The Married Man And The Mother Of A Christian Family, If They Are Faithful To Their Obligations, Will Fulfill A Mission That Is As Great As It Is Consoling: That Of Bringing Into The World And Forming Young Souls Capable Of Happiness And Love, Souls Capable Of Sanctification And Transformation In Christ.

The Most Awful Tyranny Is That Of The Proximate Utopia Where The Last Sins Are Currently Being Eliminated And Where, Tomorrow, There Will Be No More Sins Because All The Sinners Will Have Been Wiped Out.

The Only Unhappiness Is Not To Love God.

Peace Cannot Be Built On Exclusivism, Absolutism, And Intolerance. But Neither Can It Be Built On Vague Liberal Slogans And Pious Programs Gestated In The Smoke Of Confabulation. There Can Be No Peace On Earth Without The Kind Of Inner Change That Brings Man Back To His "right Mind." P. 31

To Worship Our False Selves Is To Worship Nothing. And The Worship Of Nothing Is Hell.

The Truth That Many People Never Understand Until It Is Too Late Is That The More You Try To Avoid Suffering, The More You Suffer.

World Suffering

The Beginning Of Love Is To Let Those We Love Be Perfectly Themselves, And Not To Twist Them To Fit Our Own Image. Otherwise We Love Only The Reflection Of Ourselves We Find In Them.

Inspirational Love

Thinking About Monastic Ideals Is Not The Same As Living Up To Them, But At Any Rate Such Thinking Has An Important Place In A Monk's Life, Because You Cannot Begin To Do Anything Unless You Have Some Idea What You Are Trying To Do.

I Can Depend Less And Less On My Own Power And Sense Of Direction...it Is So Strange To Advance Backwards And Get Where You Are Going In A Totally Unexpected Way

What Can We Gain By Sailing To The Moon If We Are Not Able To Cross The Abyss That Separates Us From Ourselves? This Is The Most Important Of All Voyages Of Discovery, And Without It, All The Rest Are Not Only Useless, But Disastrous.

If You Want To Have A Spiritual Life You Must Unify Your Life. A Life Is Either All Spiritual Or Not Spiritual At All.

Humility Is The Surest Sign Of Strength.

May We All Grow In Grace And Peace And Not Neglect The Silence That Is Printed In The Center Of Our Being. It Will Not Fail Us.

When Ambition Ends, Happiness Begins.

I Have Learned That One Cannot Truly Know Hope Unless He Has Found Out How Like Despair Hope Is.

The Meaning Of Life Is Found In Openness To Being And "being Present" In Full Awareness.

Things That Are Good Are Good, And If One Is Responding To That Goodness One Is In Contact With A Truth From Which One Is Getting Something. The Truth Is Doing Us Good. The Truth Of The Sunshine, The Truth Of The Rain, The Truth Of The Fresh Air, The Truth Of The Wind In The Trees, These Are Truths. And They Are Always Accessible!

Very Well, Then: Why Are You Attached To Any One Book, Or To The Words And Ways Of One Saint When He Himself Tells You To Let Them Go And Walk In Simplicity? To Hang On To Him As If To Make A Method Of Him Is To Contradict Him And To Go In The Opposite Direction To The One In Which He Would Have You Travel.

When I Pray For Peace, I Pray Not Only That The Enemies Of My Own Country May Cease To Want War, But Above All That My Country Will Cease To Do The Things That Make War Inevitable.

It Is Almost Impossible To Overestimate The Value Of True Humility And Its Power In The Spiritual Life. For The Beginning Of Humility Is The Beginning Of Blessedness And The Consummation Of Humility Is The Perfection Of All Joy. Humility Contains In Itself The Answer To All The Great Problems Of The Life Of The Soul. It Is The Only Key To Faith, With Which The Spiritual Life Begins: For Faith And Humility Are Inseparable. In Perfect Humility All Selfishness Disappears And Your Soul No Longer Lives For Itself Or In Itself For God: And It Is Lost And Submerged In Him And Transformed Into Him.

To Love Our Nothingness We Must Love Everything In Us That The Proud Man Loves When He Loves Himself. But We Must Love It All For Exactly The Opposite Reason.

Others Can Give You A Name Or A Number, But They Can Never Tell You Who You Really Are. That Is Something You Yourself Can Only Discover From Within.

As Long As I Continue To Take Myself Seriously, How Can I Consider Myself A Saint? How Can I Consider Myself A Contemplative? For The Self I Bother About Does Not Really Exist, Never Will, Never Did Except In My Own Imagination.

You Are Certainly One Of The Joys Of Life For All Who Have Ever Come Within A Mile Of You.

May God Prevent Us From Becoming "right-thinking Men"-that Is To Say Men Who Agree Perfectly With Their Own Police.

Pride Makes Us Artificial And Humility Makes Us Real.

Our Idea Of God Tells Us More About Ourselves Than About Him.

....it Is Of The Very Essence Of Christianity To Face Suffering And Death Not Because They Are Good, Not Because They Have Meaning, But Because The Resurrection Of Jesus Has Robbed Them Of Their Meaning.

Indeed, It Is A Kind Of Quintessence Of Pride To Hate And Fear Even The Kind And Legitimate Approval Of Those Who Love Us! I Mean, To Resent It As A Humiliating Patronage.

The True Inner Self Must Be Drawn Up Like A Jewel From The Bottom Of The Sea, Rescued From Confusion, From Indistinction, From Immersion In The Common, The Nondescript, The Trivial, The Sordid, The Evanescent.

For Language To Have Meaning, There Must Be Intervals Of Silence Somewhere, To Divide Word From Word And Utterance From Utterance. He Who Retires Into Silence Does Not Necessarily Hate Language. Perhaps It Is Love And Respect For Language Which Imposes Silence Upon Him. For The Mercy Of God Is Not Heard In Words Unless It Is Heard, Both Before And After The Words Are Spoken, In Silence.

There Is In All Visible Things An Invisible Fecundity, A Dimmed Light, A Meek Namelessness, A Hidden Wholeness.

Souls Are Like Athletes, That Need Opponents Worthy Of Them, If They Are To Be Tried And Extended And Pushed To The Full Use Of Their Powers, And Rewarded According To Their Capacity.

Not All Of Us Are Called To Be Hermits, But All Of Us Need Enough Silence And Solitude In Our Lives To Enable The Deeper Voice Of Our Own Self To Be Heard At Least Occasionally.

For Me To Be A Saint Means To Be Myself.

Prayer Is Not So Much A Way To Find God As A Way Of Resting In Him...who Loves Us, Who Is Near To Us.

To Love Blindly Is To Love Selfishly, Because The Goal Of Such Love Is Not The Real Advantage Of The Beloved But Only The Exercise Of Love In Our Own Souls.

Humility Sets Us Free To Do What Is Really Good, By Showing Us Our Illusions And Withdrawing Our Will From What Was Only An Apparent Good.

Today Will Never Come Again.

True Contemplation Is Not A Psychological Trick But A Theological Grace. It Can Come To Us Only As A Gift, And Not As A Result Of Our Own Clever Use Of Spiritual Techniques.

Nonviolence Seeks To ‘win’ Not By Destroying Or Even By Humiliating The Adversary, But By Convincing [the Adversary] That There Is A Higher And More Certain Common Good Than Can Be Attained By Bombs And Blood. Nonviolence, Ideally Speaking, Does Not Try To Overcome The Adversary By Winning Over [them], But To Turn [them] From An Adversary Into A Collaborator By Winning [them] Over.

The Primordial Blessing, 'increase And Multiply', Has Suddenly Become A Hemorrhage Of Terror. We Are Numbered In Billions, And Massed Together, Marshalled, Numbered, Marched Here And There, Taxed, Drilled, Armed, Worked To The Point Of Insensibility, Dazed By Information, Drugged By Entertainment, Surfeited With Everything, Nauseated With The Human Race And With Ourselves, Nauseated With Life.

Love Is Perfect In Proportion To It's Freedom.

One Of The First Things To Learn If You Want To Be A Contemplative Is To Mind Your Own Business. Nothing Is More Suspicious, In A Man Who Seems Holy, Than An Impatient Desire To Reform Other Men.

Mind Your Own Business

If You Write For God You Will Reach Many Men And Bring Them Joy. If You Write For Men--you May Make Some Money And You May Give Someone A Little Joy And You May Make A Noise In The World, For A Little While. If You Write For Yourself, You Can Read What You Yourself Have Written And After Ten Minutes You Will Be So Disgusted That You Will Wish That You Were Dead.

When You Reread Your Journal You Find Out That Your Newest Discovery Is Something You Already Found Out Five Years Ago.

There Is Not True Intimacy Between Souls Who Do Not Know How To Respect One Another's Solitude.

The Only Thing To Seek In Contemplative Prayer Is God; And We Seek Him Successfully When We Realize That We Cannot Find Him Unless He Shows Himself To Us, And Yet At The Same Time That He Would Not Have Inspired Us To Seek Him Unless We Had Already Found Him.

For Now, Oh My God, It Is To You Alone That I Can Talk, Because Nobody Else Will Understand. I Cannot Bring Any Other Man On This Earth Into The Cloud Where I Dwell In Your Light, That Is, Your Darkness, Where I Am Lost And Abashed. I Cannot Explain To Any Other Man The Anguish Which Is Your Joy Nor The Loss Which Is The Possession Of You, Nor The Distance From All Things Which Is The Arrival In You, Nor The Death Which Is The Birth In You Because I Do Not Know Anything About It Myself And All I Know Is That I Wish It Were Over - I Wish It Were Begun.

Violence Is Not Completely Fatal Until It Ceases To Disturb Us.

The Greatest Temptations Are Not Those That Solicit Our Consent To Obvious Sin, But Those That Offer Us Great Evils Masking As The Greatest Goods.

There Is A Subtle But Inescapable Connection Between The "sacred" Attitude And The Acceptance Of One's In Most Self.

The Spiritual Life Is First Of All A Life. It Is Not Merely Something To Be Known And Studied, It Is To Be Lived.

You Have Got Me Walking Up And Down All Day Under Those Trees, Saying To Me Over And Over Again, "solitude, Solitude." And You Have Turned Around And Thrown The World In My Lap. You Have Told Me, "leave All Things And Follow Me," And Then You Have Tied Half Of New York To My Foot Like A Ball And Chain. You Have Got Me Kneeling Behind That Pillar With My Mind Making A Noise Like A Bank. Is That Contemplation?

I Am Against War, Against Violence, Against Violent Revolution, For Peaceful Settlement Of Differences, For Nonviolent But Nevertheless Radical Changes. Change Is Needed, And Violence Will Not Really Change Anything: At Most It Will Only Transfer Power From One Set Of Bull-headed Authorities To Another.

The Devil Makes Many Disciples By Preaching Against Sin. He Convinces Them That The Great Evil Of Sin, Induces A Crisis Of Guilt By Which “god Is Satisfied," And After That He Lets Them Spend The Rest Of Their Lives Meditating On The Intense Sinfulness And Evident Reprobation Of Other Men.

The Truth Never Becomes Clear As Long As We Assume That Each One Of Us, Individually, Is The Center Of The Universe.

At The Center Of Our Being Is A Point Of Nothingness Which Is Untouched By Illusion, A Point Of Pure Truth, A Point Or Spark Which Belongs Entirely To God, Which Is Never At Our Disposal, From Which God Disposes Of Our Life, Which Is Inaccessable To The Fantasies Of Our Own Mind Or The Brutalities Of Our Own Will. This Little Point Of Nothingness And Of Absolute Poverty Is The Pure Glory Of God In Us.

In Meditative Prayer, One Thinks And Speaks Not Only With The Mind And Lips, But In A Certain Sense With One's Whole Being... All Good Meditative Prayer Is A Conversation Of Our Entire Self To God.

But There Is Greater Comfort In The Substance Of Silence Than In The Answer To A Question.

Contemplation In The Age Of Auschwitz And Dachau, Solovky And Karaganda Is Something Darker And More Fearsome Than Contemplation In The Age Of The Church Fathers. For That Very Reason, The Urge To Seek A Path Of Spiritual Light Can Be A Subtle Temptation To Sin. It Certainly Is Sin If It Means A Frank Rejection Of The Burden Of Our Age, An Escape Into Unreality And Spiritual Illusion, So As Not To Share The Misery Of Other Men.

Faith Is A Light Of Such Supreme Brilliance That It Dazzles The Mind And Darkens All Its Visions Of Other Realities, But In The End When We Become Used To The New Light, We Gain A New View Of All Reality Transfigured And Elevated In The Light Itself.

If It So Happened That I Had Once Written A Best-seller, This Was A Pure Accident, Due To Inattention And Naivete, And I Would Take Very Good Care Never To Do The Same Again. If I Had A Message For My Contemporaries, I Said, It Was Surely This: Be Anything You Like, Be Madmen, Drunks, And Bastards Of Every Shape And Form, But At All Costs Avoid One Thing: Success.

Love Is Our True Destiny. We Do Not Find The Meaning Of Life By Ourselves Alone - We Find It With Another.

The Holy Spirit Is The Most Perfect Gift Of The Father To Men, And Yet He Is The One Gift Which The Father Gives Most Easily.

Everything In Modern City Life Is Calculated To Keep Man From Entering Into Himself And Thinking About Spiritual Things. Even With The Best Of Intentions A Spiritual Man Finds Himself Exhausted And Deadened And Debased By The Constant Noise Of Machines And Loudspeakers, The Dead Air And The Glaring Lights Of Offices And Shops, The Everlasting Suggestion Of Advertising And Propaganda. The Whole Mechanism Of Modern Life Is Geared For A Flight From God And From The Spirit Into The Wilderness Of Neurosis.

It Is A Glorious Destiny To Be A Member Of The Human Race, Now I Realize What We All Are . If Only They [people] Could All See Themselves As They Really Are I Suppose The Big Problem Would Be That We Would Fall Down And Worship Each Other At The Center Of Our Being Is A Point Of Nothingness Which Is Untouched By Sin And By Illusions, A Point Of Pure Truth This Little Point Is The Pure Glory Of God In Us. It Is In Everybody.

I Shall Lead You Through The Loneliness, The Solitude You Will Not Understand; But It Is My Shortcut To Your Soul.

Peace Demands The Most Heroic Labor And The Most Difficult Sacrifice. It Demands Greater Heroism Than War. It Demands Greater Fidelity To The Truth And A Much More Perfect Purity Of Conscience.

Love In Fact Is The Spiritual Life, And Without It All The Other Exercises Of The Spirit, However Lofty, Are Emptied Of Content And Become Mere Illusions.

Saints Are What They Are Not Because Their Sanctity Makes Them Admirable To Others, But Because The Gift Of Sainthood Makes It Possible For Them To Admire Everyone Else.

The Lord Did Not Create Suffering. Pain And Death Came Into The World With The Fall Of Man. But After Man Had Chosen Suffering In Preference To The Joys Of Union With God, The Lord Turned Suffering Itself Into A Way By Which Man Could Come To The Perfect Knowledge Of God.

I Have The Immense Joy Of Being Man, A Member Of A Race In Which God Himself Became Incarnate. As If The Sorrows And Stupidities Of The Human Condition Could Overwhelm Me, Now That I Realize What We All Are. And If Only Everybody Could Realize This! But It Cannot Be Explained. There Is No Way Of Telling People That They Are All Walking Around Shining Like The Sun.

The Man Who Fears To Be Alone Will Never Be Anything But Lonely, No Matter How Much He May Surround Himself With People. But The Man Who Learns, In Solitude And Recollection, To Be At Peace With His Own Loneliness, And To Prefer Its Reality To The Illusion Of Merely Natural Companionship, Comes To Know The Invisible Companionship Of God. Such A One Is Alone With God In All Places, And He Alone Truly Enjoys The Companionship Of Other Men, Because He Loves Them In God In Whom Their Presence Is Not Tiresome, And Because Of Whom His Own Love For Them Can Never Know Satiety.

The Basic Problem Is Not Political, It Is Apolitical And Human. One Of The Most Important Things To Do Is To Keep Cutting Deliberately Through Political Lines And Barriers And Emphasizing The Fact That These Are Largely Fabrications And That There Is Another Dimension, A Genuine Reality, Totally Opposed To The Fictions Of Politics: The Human Dimension Which Politics Pretend To Arrogate Entirely To Themselves. This Is The Necessary First Step Along The Long Way Toward The Perhaps Impossible Task Of Purifying, Humanizing And Somehow Illuminating Politics Themselves.

Duty Does Not Have To Be Dull. Love Can Make It Beautiful And Fill It With Life.

Our Technological Society Has No Longer Any Place In It For Wisdom That Seeks Truth For Its Own Sake, That Seeks The Fullness Of Being, That Seeks To Rest In An Intuition Of The Very Ground Of All Being. Without Wisdom, The Apparent Opposition Of Action And Contemplation, Of Work And Rest, Of Involvement And Detachment, Can Never Be Resolved.

We Cannot Love Ourselves Unless We Love Others, And We Cannot Love Others Unless We Love Ourselves. But A Selfish Love Of Ourselves Makes Us Incapable Of Loving Others.

A Man Searching For Enlightenment Is Like A Man Sitting On An Ass In Search Of An Ass

Thinking Prevents The Unconscious From Speaking.

Prayer And Love Are Really Learned In The Hour When Prayer Becomes Impossible And Your Heart Turns To Stone.

If We Examine Ourselves Carefully We Shall See Most Of Us Have An Enormous Amount Of Unfinished Business...we Have To Be Free So That We Can Just Step Across The Line And That's It. That Is What Real Freedom Is.

Unfinished Business

It Is My Belief, That We Should Not Be Too Sure Of Having Found Christ In Ourselves Until We Have Found Him Also In That Part Of Humanity That Is Most Remote From Our Own.

Every One Of Us Is Shadowed By An Illusory Person: A False Self. We Are Not Very Good At Recognizing Illusions, Least Of All The Ones We Cherish About Ourselves.

First Of All, Although Men Have A Common Destiny, Each Individual Also Has To Work Out His Own Personal Salvation For Himself In Fear And Trembling. We Can Help One Another To Find The Meaning Of Life No Doubt. But In The Last Analysis, The Individual Person Is Responsible For Living His Own Life And For "finding Himself." If He Persists In Shifting His Responsibility To Somebody Else, He Fails To Find Out The Meaning Of His Own Existence. You Cannot Tell Me Who I Am And I Cannot Tell You Who You Are. If You Do Not Know Your Own Identity, Who Is Going To Identify You?

I Myself Am Part Of The Weather And Part Of The Climate And Part Of The Place … It Is Certainly Part Of My Life Of Prayer.

Love Is Our True Destiny.

You Do Not Need To Know Precisely What Is Happening, Or Exactly Where It Is All Going. What You Need Is To Recognize The Possibilities And Challenges Offered By The Present Moment, And To Embrace Them With Courage, Faith And Hope.

To Be Ordinary Is Not A Choice: It Is The Usual Freedom Of Men Without Visions.

Hurry Ruins Saints As Well As Artists.

As A Magnifying Glass Concentrates The Rays Of The Sun Into A Little Burning Knot Of Heat That Can Set Fire To A Dry Leaf Or A Piece Of Paper, So The Mystery Of Christ In The Gospel Concentrates The Rays Of God's Light And Fire To A Point That Sets Fire To The Spirit Of Man. ... Through The Glass Of His Incarnation He Concentrates The Rays Of His Divine Truth And Love Upon Us So That We Feel The Burn, And All Mystical Experience Is Communicated To Men Through The Man Christ.

God Himself Begins To Live In Me Not Only As My Creator But As My Other And True Self.

A Faith That Is Afraid Of Other People Is No Faith At All.

How Deluded We Sometimes Are By The Clear Notions We Get Out Of Books. They Make Us Think That We Really Understand Things Of Which We Have No Practical Knowledge At All.

Detachment From Things Does Not Mean Setting Up A Contradiction Between 'things' And 'god' As If God Were Another Thing And As If Creatures Were His Rivals. We Do Not Detach Ourselves From Things In Order To Attach Ourselves To God, But Rather We Become Detached From Ourselves In Order To See And Use All Things In And For God.

Today The Artist Has Inherited The Combined Functions Of Hermit, Pilgrim, Prophet, Priest, Shaman, Sorcerer, Soothsayer, Alchemist.

Take More Time, Cover Less Ground.

A Tree Gives Glory To God By Being A Tree. For In Being What God Means It To Be It Is Obeying [god]. It “consents,” So To Speak, To [god's] Creative Love. It Is Expressing An Idea Which Is In God And Which Is Not Distinct From The Essence Of God, And Therefore A Tree Imitates God By Being A Tree

We Are Not At Peace With Others Because We Are Not At Peace With Ourselves, And We Are Not At Peace With Ourselves Because We Are Not At Peace With God

To Say That I Am Made In The Image Of God Is To Say That Love Is The Reason For My Existence, For God Is Love. Love Is My True Identity. Selflessness Is My True Self. Love Is My True Character. Love Is My Name.

The Silence Of The Spheres Is The Music Of A Wedding Feast. The More We Persist In Misunderstanding The Phenomena Of Life, The More We Analyze Them Out Into Strange Finalities And Complex Purposes Of Our Own, The More We Involve Ourselves In Sadness. But It Does Not Matter Much Because No Despair Of Ours Can Alter The Reality Of Things, Or Stain The Joy Of The Cosmic Dance Which Is Always There.

Nevertheless, The Liturgy Of Ash Wednesday Is Not Focussed On The Sinfulness Of The Penitent But On The Mercy Of God. The Question Of Sinfulness Is Raised Precisely Because This Is A Day Of Mercy, And The Just Do Not Need A Savior.

The Secret Of My Full Identity Is Hidden In Him. He Alone Can Make Me Who I Am, Or Rather Who I Will Be When At Last I Fully Begin To Be. But Unless I Desire This Identity And Work To Find It With Him And In Him, The Work Will Never Be Done

My Lord God, I Have No Idea Where I Am Going. I Do Not See The Road Ahead Of Me...you Will Lead Me By The Right Road, Though I May Know Nothing About It. Therefore I Will Trust You Always Though I May Seem To Be Lost And In The Shadow Of Death. I Will Not Fear, For You Are Ever With Me, And You Will Never Leave Me To Face My Perils Alone.

Shadow Of Death

Infinite Sharing Is The Law Of God S Inner Life.

It Is In Deep Solitude That I Find The Gentleness With Which I Can Truly Love My Brothers. The More Solitary I Am, The More Affection I Have For Them. It Is Pure Affection, And Filled With Reverance For The Solitude Of Others. Solitude And Silence Teach Me To Love My Brothers For What They Are, Not For What They Say.

Business Is Not The Supreme Virtue, And Sanctity Is Not Measured By The Amount Of Work We Accomplish. Perfection Is Found In The Purity Of Our Love For God, And This Pure Love Is A Delicate Plant That Grows Best Where There Is Plenty Of Time For It To Mature

Life Reveals Itself To Us Only In So Far As Well Live It.

Do Not Be Too Quick To Assume Your Enemy Is A Savage Just Because He Is Your Enemy. Perhaps He Is Your Enemy Because He Thinks You Are A Savage. Or Perhaps He Is Afraid Of You Because He Feels That You Are Afraid Of Him. And Perhaps If He Believed You Are Capable Of Loving Him He Would No Longer Be Your Enemy.

The Logic Of Worldly Success Rests On A Fallacy: The Strange Error That Our Perfection Depends On The Thoughts And Opinions And Applause Of Other Men! A Weird Life It Is, Indeed, To Be Living Always In Somebody Else's Imagination, As If That Were The Only Place In Which One Could At Last Become Real!

We Thank Him Less By Words Than By The Serene Happiness Of Silent Acceptance. It Is Our Emptiness In The Presence Of His Reality, Our Silence In The Presence Of His Infinitely Rich Silence, Our Joy In The Bosom Of The Serene Darkness In Which His Light Holds Us Absorbed, It Is All This That Praises Him.

Cupidity...takes Created Things For Ends In Themselves, Which They Are Not. The Will That Seeks Rest In Creatures For Their Own Sake Stops On The Way To Its True End, Terminates In A Value Which Does Not Exist, And Thus Frustrates All Its Deepest Capacities For Happiness And Peace.

The Rush And Pressure Of Modern Life Are A Form, Perhaps The Most Common Form, Of Contemporary Violence. To Allow Oneself To Be Carried Away By A Multitude Of Conflicting Concerns, To Surrender To Too Many Demands, To Commit Oneself To Too Many Projects, To Want To Help Everyone In Everything, Is To Succumb To Violence. The Frenzy Of Our Activity Neutralizes Our Work For Peace. It Destroys Our Own Inner Capacity For Peace. It Destroys The Fruitfulness Of Our Own Work, Because It Kills The Root Of Inner Wisdom Which Makes Work Fruitful.

My God, I Pray Better To You By Breathing And Walking Than By Talking, Just As In Choir I Sing Best When I Am Thinking About Something Else, Or Better Still, Praying.

Grace Is Not A Strange, Magic Substance Which Is Subtly Filtered Into Our Souls To Act As A Kind Of Spiritual Penicillin. Grace Is Unity, Oneness Within Ourselves, Oneness With God.

The Pleasure Of A Good Act Is Something To Be Remembered - Not In Order To Feed Our Complacency But In Order To Remind Us That Virtuous Actions Are Not Only Possible And Valuable, But That They Can Become Easier And More Delightful And More Fruitful Than The Acts Of Vice Which Oppose And Frustrate Them.

For Every Gain In Deep Certitude There Is A Corresponding Growth Of Superficial "doubt." This Doubt Is By No Means Opposed To Genuine Faith, But It Mercilessly Examines And Questions The Spurious "faith" Of Everyday Life, The Human Faith Which Is Nothing But The Passive Acceptance Of Conventional Opinion.

We Have The Choice Of Two Identities: The External Mask Which Seems To Be Real...and The Hidden, Inner Person Who Seems To Us To Be Nothing, But Who Can Give Himself Eternally To The Truth In Whom He Subsists. (295)

What Can We Gain By Sailing To The Moon If We Cannot Cross The Abyss That Separates Us From Ourselves?

See, See Who God Is, See The Glory Of God, Going Up To Him Out Of This Incomprehensible And Infinite Sacrifice In Which All History Begins And Ends, All Individual Lives Begin And End, In Which Every Story Is Told, And Finished, And Settled For Joy Or For Sorrow: The One Point Of Reference For All The Truths That Are Outside Of God, Their Center, Their Focus: Love.

For Although God Is Right With Us And In Us And Out Of Us And All Through Us, We Have To Go On Journeys To Find Him.

We Are Not Converted Only Once In Our Lives But Many Times And This Endless Series Of Conversions And Inner Revolutions Leads To Our Transformation.

Life Is Not Accomplishing Some Special Work But Attaining To A Degree Of Consciousness And Inner Freedom Which Is Beyond All Works And Attainments.

What We Have To Be Is What We Are.

The Goal Of Fasting Is Inner Unity.

To Enter Into The Realm Of Contemplation One Must In A Certain Sense Die: But This Death Is In Fact The Entrance To A Higher Life. It Is A Death For The Sake Of Life, Which Leaves Behind All That We Can Know Or Treasure As Life, As Thought, As Experience, As Joy, As Being.

Love Is Not A Matter Of Getting What You Want. Quite The Contrary. The Insistence On Always Having What You Want, On Always Being Satisfied, On Always Being Fulfilled, Makes Love Impossible.

Getting What You Want

We Are Obliged To Love One Another. We Are Not Strictly Bound To 'like' One Another. Love Governs The Will: 'liking' Is A Matter Of Sense And Sensibility. Nevertheless, If We Really Love Others It Will Not Be Too Hard To Like Them Also.

Love One Another

When Society Is Made Up Of Men Who Know No Interior Solitude It Can No Longer Be Held Together By Love: And Consequently It Is Held Together By A Violent And Abusive Authority. But When Men Are Violently Deprived Of The Solitude And Freedom Which Are Their Due, Then Society In Which They Live Becomes Putrid, It Festers With Servility, Resentment And Hate.

In General, It Can Be Said That No Contemplative Life Is Possible Without Ascetic Self-discipline. One Must Learn To Survive Without The Habit-forming Luxuries Which Get Such A Hold On Men Today. I Do Not Say That To Be A Contemplative One Absolutely Has To Go Without Smoking Or Without Alcohol, But Certainly One Must Be Able To Use These Things Without Being Dominated By An Uncontrolled Need For Them.

Contemplative Life

The Man Who Lives In Division Is Living In Death. He Cannot Find Himself Because He Is Lost; He Has Ceased To Be A Reality. The Person He Believes Himself To Be Is A Bad Dream.

The Hindus Are Not Looking For Us To Send Them Men Who Will Build Schools And Hospitals, Although Those Things Are Good And Useful In Themselves--and Perhaps Very Badly Needed In India: They Want To Know If We Have Any Saints To Send Them.

We Must Make The Choices That Enable Us To Fulfill The Deepest Capacities Of Our Real Selves.

Decisions You Make

Stop Asking Yourself Questions That Have No Meaning. Or If They Have, You'll Find Out When You Need To -- Find Out Both The Questions And The Answers.

Memory Is Corrupted And Ruined By A Crowd Of Memories. If I Am Going To Have A True Memory, There Are A Thousand Things That Must First Be Forgotten. Memory Is Not Fully Itself When It Reaches Only Into The Past. A Memory That Is Not Alive To The Present Does Not Remember The Here And Now, Does Not Remember Its True Identity, Is Not Memory At All. He Who Remembers Nothing But Facts And Past Events, And Is Never Brought Back Into The Present, Is A Victim Of Amnesia.

It Is Easy Enough To Tell The Poor To Accept Their Poverty As Gods Will When You Yourself Have Warm Clothes And Plenty Of Food And Medical Care And A Roof Over Your Head And No Worry About The Rent. But If You Want Them To Believe Youtry To Share Some Of Their Poverty And See If You Can Accept It As Gods Will Yourself!

Roof Over Your Head

The Solution Of The Problem Of Life Is Life Itself. Life Is Not Attained By Reasoning And Analysis, But First Of All By Living. For Until We Have Begun To Live Our Prudence Has No Material To Work On. And Until We Have Begun To Fail We Have No Way Of Working Out Our Success.

Everybody Has An Instinctive Desire To Do Good Things And Avoid Evil. But That Desire Is Sterile As Long As We Have No Experience Of What It Means To Be Good.

Man Was Made For The Highest Activity, Which Is, In Fact, His Rest.

In Silence God Ceases To Be An Object And Becomes An Experience.

People Are In A Hurry To Magnify Themselves By Imitating What Is Popular- And Too Lazy To Think Of Anything Better.

Contemplation Is Life Itself, Fully Awake, Fully Active, And Fully Aware That It Is Alive. It Is Spiritual Wonder. It Is Spontaneous Awe At The Sacredness Of Life, Of Being. It Is Gratitude For Life, For Awareness, And For Being. It Is A Vivid Realization Of The Fact That Life And Being In Us Proceed From An Invisible, Transcendent, And Infinitely Abundant Source.

You Will Never Be Able To Have Perfect Interior Peace And Recollection Unless You Are Detached Even From The Desire Of Peace And Recollection. You Will Never Be Able To Pray Perfectly Until You Are Detached From The Pleasures Of Prayer.

Every Man Has A Vocation To Be Someone: But He Must Understand Clearly That In Order To Fulfill This Vocation He Can Only Be One Person: Himself.

I Came With The Notion Of Perhaps Saying Something For Monks And To Monks Of All Religions Because I Am Supposed To Be A Monk. ... My Dear Brothers, We Are Already One. But We Imagine That We Are Not. And What We Have To Recover Is Our Original Unity. What We Have To Be Is What We Are

Reason Is In Fact The Path To Faith, And Faith Takes Over When Reason Can Say No More.

Our Whole Life Is A Meditation Of Our Last Decision - The Only Decision That Matters.

The Peace Produced By Grace Is A Spiritual Stability Too Deep For Violence — It Is Unshakeable

Be Still: There Is No Longer Any Need Of Comment. It Was A Lucky Wind That Blew Away His Halo With His Cares, A Lucky Sea That Drowned His Reputation.

By Reading The Scriptures I Am So Renewed That All Nature Seems Renewed Around Me And With Me. The Sky Seems To Be A Pure, A Cooler Blue, The Trees A Deeper Green. The Whole World Is Charged With The Glory Of God And I Feel Fire And Music Under My Feet.

The Very Contradictions In My Life Are In Some Ways Signs Of God's Mercy To Me.

Zen Enriches No One. There Is No Body To Be Found. The Birds May Come And Circle For A While In The Place Where It Is Thought To Be. But They Soon Go Elsewhere. When They Are Gone, The "nothing," The "no-body" That Was There, Suddenly Appears. That Is Zen. It Was There All The Time But The Scavengers Missed It, Because It Was Not Their Kind Of Prey.

Love Winter When The Plant Says Nothing.

Actions Are The Doors And Windows Of Being. Unless We Act, We Have No Way Of Knowing What We Are.

Love Is The Door To Eternity.

We Live On The Brink Of Disaster Because We Do Not Know How To Let Life Alone. We Do Not Respect The Living And Fruitful Contradictions And Paradoxes Of Which True Life Is Full.

For If I Am To Love Truly And Freely, I Must Be Able To Give Something That Is Truly My Own To Another. If My Heart Does Not First Belong To Me, How Can I Give It To Another?

To Those Who Have No Personal Experience Of This Revolutionary Aspect Of Christian Truth, But Who See Only The Outer Crust Of Dead, Human Conservatism That Tends To Form Around The Church The Way Barnacles Gather On The Hull Of A Ship, All This Talk About Dynamism Sounds Foolish.

To Consider Persons And Events And Situations Only In The Light Of Their Effect On Me Is To Live On The Doorstep Of Hell. Selfishness Is Doomed To Frustration Centered As It Is Upon A Lie. To Live Exclusively For Myself, I Must Make All Things Bend Themselves To My Will As If I Were A God.

The Whole Idea Of Compassion Is Based On A Keen Awareness Of The Other.... The Whole Purpose Of Life Is To Live By Love.

What Does It Mean To Know And Experience My Own “nothingness?” It Is Not Enough To Turn Away In Disgust From My Illusions And Faults And Mistakes, To Separate Myself From Them As If They Were Not, And As If I Were Someone Other Than Myself. This Kind Of Self-annihilati On Is Only A Worse Illusion, It Is A Pretended Humility Which, By Saying “i Am Nothing” I Mean In Effect “i Wish I Were Not What I Am.

Let Us Come Alive To The Splendor That Is All Around Us And See The Beauty In Ordinary Things.

Ordinary Things

The Desire To Kill Is Like The Desire To Attack Another With An Ingot Of Red -hot Iron: I Have To Pick Up The Incandescent Metal And Burn My Own Hand While Burning The Other. Hate Itself Is The Seed Of Death In My Own Heart, While It Seeks The Death Of The Other.

The Importance Of Detachment From Things, The Importance Of Poverty, Is That We Are Supposed To Be Free From Things That We Might Prefer To People. Wherever Things Have Become More Important Than People, We Are In Trouble. That Is The Crux Of The Whole Matter.

While Some Men See Ordinary Happenings, Others See Divine Light And Guidance.

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