Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain:
“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”
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Blaise Pascal, Pensées:
“I have discovered that all the trouble in the world stems from one fact, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”
“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”
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Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks:
“Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so that they are capable, finally, of maintaining a natural flexibility.”
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Dorothy Day:
“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”
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Hugh Kenner, “The Making of the Modernist Canon”:
“Having no reputation whatever, I had nothing to lose. I was naive enough not to guess that I was mortgaging my future; it is sometimes liberating not to know how the world works.”