Quotes About Reflection

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.

If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.

Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You'll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism thinking (whereas it's really your ego's narcissistic reaction to the moment). You'll position things to quickly as inferior or superior, with me or against me, and most of the time you'll be wrong.

In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us, and truly influence us.

Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.

Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.

Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text.

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us.

Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.

Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different or better past.

Remember finally, that the ashes on your forehead are created from the burnt palms of last Palm Sunday. New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.

God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience.

We moved from wondering to answering, which has not served us well at all.

grace is found at the depths and in the death of everything. After these smaller deaths, we know that the only "deadly sin" is to swim on the surface of things, where we never see, find, or desire God and love.

And we must—absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.

You can unlock spiritual things only from within.

I believe contemplation shows us that nothing inside us is as bad as our hatred and denial of the bad. Hating and denying it only complicates our problems. All of life is grist for the mill. Paula D'Arcy puts it, "God comes to us disguised as our life." Everything belongs; God uses everything. There are no dead-ends. There is no wasted energy. Everything

We always become what we behold; the presence that we practice matters.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting...you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic.

The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.