If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the importance of meaningful communication and self-reflection in life.
Thomas Merton emphasizes that if we fill our lives with meaningless chatter and fail to listen or reflect, we will lack substance when faced with pivotal choices. Ultimately, he suggests that wisdom comes from limiting our words and focusing instead on understanding and growth.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about the importance of listening.
The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
You are made in the image of what you desire.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
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.
Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.
He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.
It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.
Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
In the end I do respond to my own instincts. Sometimes they're successful, and obviously sometimes they're not. But you have to, I think, remain true to what you believe in.
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