The word of God...penetrating our inmost being is more than a communication of light: it is a new birth, the beginning of a new being.
Thomas Merton
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash--at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the 'newness,' the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my own country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.
At every moment display righteous indignation over the means (whether good or evil) which your opponent has used to attain the same corrupt end which you are trying to achieve. Point to the means he is using as evidence that your own purposes are righteous--even though they are the same as his.... In politics, as in everything else, pharisaism is not self-righteousness only, but the conviction that, in order to be right, it is sufficient to prove that somebody else is wrong.
Every person becomes the image of the God they adore.
Whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present to you, lives in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or sermons.... If you dare to penetrate your own silence...and risk the sharing of that silence with the lonely other who seeks God through and with you, then you will recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words.... It is the intimate union...of God's spirit and your own inmost self, so that you and God are, in all truth, one.
We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others. What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean, first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.
Gandhi does not say that everyone may expect to become nonviolent by wishing to do so. But that all who dimly realize their need for truth should seek it by the way of nonviolence, since there is really no other way.
They may not fully succeed...but they will at least begin to attain the truth. Because of them there will be at least a little truth in the darkness of a violent world.... He believed that in the hidden depths of our being, depths which are too often completely sealed off from our conscious and immoral way of life, we are more truly nonviolent than violent. He believed that love is more natural to us than hatred.
God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself.
We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration.
The primoridial blessing, "increase and multiply," has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life.
As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the earth. As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet. There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.
In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for us.