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.
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
I'm convinced that we can write and live our own scripts more than most people will acknowledge. I also know the price that must be paid. It's a real struggle to do it. It requires visualization and affirmation. It involves living a life of integrity, starting with making and keeping promises, until the whole human personality the senses, the thinking, the feeling, and the intuition are ultimately integrated and harmonized.
You clearly hate to yield, but you will regret it when your anger has passed. Such natures are justly the hardest for themselves to bear.
We should keep in mind that it is easy to concoct stories explaining the past or to become confident about dubious scenarios of the future. We should view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism.
A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labor of bees, will often be stung for his curiosity.
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