Dale Easley's Favorite Quotations
| The Seven Story Mountain |
| Merton, Thomas |
| I believed in the beautiful myth about having a good time as long as
it does not hurt anybody else. You cannot live for your own pleasure and
your own convenience without inevitably hurting and injuring the feeling
and the interests of practically everybody you meet. But, as a matter of
fact, in the natural order no matter what ideals may be theoretically
possible, most people more or less live for themselves and for their own
interests and pleasures or for those of their family or group, and
therefore they are constantly interfering with one another's aims, and
hurting one another and injuring one another, whether they mean it or not.
[p.~131] So there I was, with all the liberty that I had been promising myself for so long. The world was mine. How did I like it? I was doing just what I pleased, and instead of being filled with happiness and well-being, I was miserable. [p.~133] I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice. It is constantly being blinded and perverted by the ends and aims of passion, and the evidence it presents to us with such a show of impartiality and objectivity is fraught with interest and propaganda. We have become marvelous at self-delusion; all the more so, because we have gone to such trouble to convince ourselves of our own absolute infallibility. The desires of the flesh--- and by that I mean not only sinful desires, but even ordinary, normal appetites for comfort and ease and human respect, are fruitful sources of every kind of error and misjudgment, and because we have these yearnings in us, our intellects (which, if they operated all alone in a vacuum, would indeed register with pure impartiality what they saw) present to us everything distorted and accommodated to the norms of our desire. [p.~250-251] Human nature has a way of making very specious arguments to suit its own cowardice and lack of generosity. [p.~401] I had no special sense that this was my vocation, but on the other hand I could no longer doubt that St.~Bonaventure's had outlived its usefulness in my spiritual life. I did not belong there any more. It was too tame, too safe, too sheltered. It demanded nothing of me. It had no particular cross. It left me to myself, belonging to myself, in full possession of my own will, in full command of all that God had given me that I might give it back to Him. As long as I remained there, I still had given up nothing, or very little, no matter how poor I happened to be. [p.~434] |