Quotes About Reflection

Thomas Merton once said that some of the most violent people he met were social activists, in what they did to themselves.

And therein lies my problem – how to hold together all the words about God that I have learned as a good Christian and then as a professional theologian with my growing awareness, especially over the last three decades of my life, of God as Mystery. Come to think of it, this problem of "words" may not only be bubbling under the other problems I've dealt with in the preceding two chapters: it may be one of the major causes of those problems.

All religion is in daily need of reformation because all religion, in both blatant and subtle ways, seeks to make itself and its creeds, codes, and cults more important than the revelation and experience it is meant to serve and pass on.

words must respect the Mystery and never idolatrously take its place.

To put it bluntly but also imploringly: we Christians need more silence in our services and liturgies. Just how this might be realized, just how we

If Mystery is the goal and content of all religious experience, then Silence is a necessary means of letting Mystery speak.

Christian prayer is generally too worshipful and therefore dualistic. And it is too wordy.

The person I am with a seventy-year-old body (and all its accumulated experience) will not only look but will truly be different from the person I was with an eighteen-year-old body. Same person but – thank God – so different!

So contemplation – regular practices of spirituality – is necessary both to have a product to deliver and to have the energy to deliver it.

Everyone takes pause at 40. It's the age you have to assess everything in your life. It's the fictitious marker that's always coming up when you're young. The world really does look at you to kind of have it together by 40, and be successful by 40. Whatever success means.

I'm kind of a failure. I mean, I'll be honest. I'm successful in that I'm getting to work on great stuff, but I think I'm a failure in all the personal stuff that is most important to me.

The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.

Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of judgement.

The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.

Father Polda had walked up from his little chapel in Steg, as was his nightly custom, to sit and talk with the men and their families, for it was mostly under the sun and the stars that he preached, or sought the God that he served.

We can only hope we leave behind persons whose lives are better for our having lived.

The drink? Yes, I've had tough times in my life, especially the last year, regarding my ex-wife, my kids, I nearly broke my neck, I was on death row with pneumonia.

I never refused an autograph, never refused to buy someone a drink. Now I'm learning to say I've got other things on, instead of doing it and wondering why.

D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone.

Shut your eyes in order to see.

Moved by an unconsious sentiment born out of solitude and savagery - idle tales of a noughty child who sometimes reflects and who is always a lover of the beautiful - the beauty that is personal - the only beauty that is human.

I was 37 when my father died-and I no longer had any freedom of choice over what I would do with the rest of my life.