Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Merton

Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.

Thomas Merton

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

Thomas Merton

I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival.

Thomas Merton

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

Thomas Merton

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

Thomas Merton

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.

Thomas Merton

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

Thomas Merton

Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.

Thomas Merton

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.

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 Carlyle

Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man.

Thomas Carlyle

Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.

Tony Kushner

It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

Stendhal

I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of a nation.

Sigmund Freud

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Sigmund Freud

None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.

Shirley Hazzard

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books.

Steven Levitt

I do think that the standard media is controlled by the conventional wisdom about global warming. We've come to believe - from reading a lot of articles and talking to a lot of scientists - that there's another side to be heard.

Steven Amsterdam

The better we are at accepting the limits of our world, the more easily we can embrace what we have.

Susan Jeffers

O Lord, please fill my mouth with worthwhile stuff, and nudge me when I've said enough. Enlightenment is the "quiet acceptance of what is" I believe the truly enlightened beings are those who refuse to allow themselves to be distressed over things that simply are the way they are. - Wayne Dyer Learn the richness of solitude and quiet. That "still small voice" is yearning to be heard.

Richard Moss

To me, wholeness is the key to aliveness. It is more than just physical vitality, it is radiance, coming from being at one with yourself and your experience. Life then flows through you.

Richard Mitchell

Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars.

Sydney J. Harris

If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?

Suze Orman

You're thinking to yourself, 'How is it possible that I am going to pay back $150,000 in student loans? I'm never going to pay that back. What am I going to do?' Listen to me and listen to me good, class of 2013. I want you to think back to all of these things you said to yourself, 'I can't do that. I can't palpate a cow. And what's worse, palpating a cow or taking semen from a horse?' But you did it, didn't you?

Scott Adams

Am I getting smart with you? How would you know?

Scott Adams

Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to get along without it.

Scott Adams

Management is nature's way of removing idiots from the productive flow.

Scott Adams

There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives.

Kevin J. Anderson

Every life has a destiny... the trick is to discover it before then end of your life. Otherwise, you will have too many regrets.

Kent Nerburn

There are many ways to seek wisdom. There is travel, there are masters, there is service. There is staring into the eyes of children and elders and lovers and strangers. There is sitting silently in one spot and there is being swept along in life's turbulent current. Life itself will grant you wisdom in ways you may neither understand nor choose. It is up to you to be open to all these sources of wisdom and to embrace them with your whole heart.

Keith Miller

Pain is the doorway to wisdom and to truth.

Katy Perry

You never know what's actually going on in a person's life. You don't know what happened to them before you met them...and that's why they are the way they are. But I do think about it whenever I get in contact with my fans. I know this may be the only time they'll ever meet me. I try to take advantage of that moment and be kind and grateful.