The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.
Interpretation
Life's true understanding comes from experiencing it rather than merely analyzing it.
Thomas Merton emphasizes that the essence of life cannot be understood through pure intellectual reasoning; instead, it is gathered through real-life experiences. He suggests that to truly grasp the nature of existence, one must actively engage in living and experiencing the joys and challenges it brings, rather than solely relying on analysis or theoretical understanding.
In practice
In a motivational speech about living authentically and embracing experiences.
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.
In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.
Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
If you've gotta think about being cool, you ain't cool.
Everything has changed except the way man thinks (when the hydrogen bomb was exploded)
The most important thing in my life is Christ. Heβs more important to me than winning or losing or whether Iβm playing or not. Everything else is just a bonus.
If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.
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