Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but also because of the silence in it: without the alternation of sound and silence, there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound… we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth.

 ― Thomas Merton

 “It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When we do this we will be able first of all to face and accept our own limitations. As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be 'as gods'. We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“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?”
― Thomas Merton

“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds” ― Thomas Merton

 “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.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

 “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!”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“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.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.”
― Thomas Merton

“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. ” ― Thomas Merton

“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 the violence of our times.”
― Thomas Merton

“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.”
― Thomas Merton

“If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.”

― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude  

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

― Thomas Merton

“Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.”
― Thomas Merton

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
― Thomas Merton , No Man Is an Island

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.”
― Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.”
― Thomas Merton, Love and Living

“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.”
― Thomas Merton  

This morning, as I was sipping my coffee and watching the sunrise, the steam from the cup fogged my glasses, momentarily blocking the light. It was a perfect, quiet moment. Looking up at the sky, watching the birds catch the thermal drifts and gazing at the bare treetops, I felt a surge of genuine gratitude.

Dr. Gabriel Barsawme, LSW 

McMillan Cottom: “When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled. I think that this promise of an artificial intelligent future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they’re gonna be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled—AI is already here, the end is already here—then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse.”   

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/refusing-to-accept-big-tech-s-ai-poisoned-future-of-journalism

Flannery O’Connor:“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”

Marcus Aurelius: Each of us needs what nature gives us, when nature gives it.

This Be the Verse

 by Philip Larkin.

 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

 

But they were fucked up in their turn

  By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

  And half at one another’s throats.

 

Man hands on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

  And don’t have any kids yourself.

__________

“This Be the Verse” from Collected Poems, Philip Larkin, Faber & Faber, 2003.

If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.

  ― Leonard Cohen from the poem Good Advice for Someone like Me

Artists don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

 — Stephen De Staebler

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

 ― Leonard Cohen 

“It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever  

 The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming--Diana and Helen--and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

“Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.” ― John Cheever

“Long ago when they first invented the atomic bomb people used to worry about its going off and killing everybody, but they didn’t know that mankind has enough dynamite right in his guts to tear the fucking planet to pieces. Me, I know.” ― John Cheever, Falconer