When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that a perspective of impending end encourages a calm and thorough approach to life and work.
Thomas Merton's quote reflects on the idea that when one perceives life as potentially fleeting, it can lead to a more deliberate and thoughtful engagement with tasks and responsibilities. Instead of rushing or acting impulsively, the realization of life's fragility encourages patience, care, and quality in one's efforts. Essentially, it highlights how a sense of urgency can paradoxically lead to a more meaningful and profound experience.
In practice
This quote could be used in a motivational speech about the importance of taking time in one's craft.
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.
It is a true proverb, that if you live with a lame man, you will learn to limp.
The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are blindly adopted; the second wilfully preferred.
A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.
If you want people to think out of the box, you shouldn't create the box in the first place.
The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler.
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
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