"Ecclesiastes is a book of earth, and the Gospel ethic is an ethic of revelation made on earth of a God Incarnate. The "Little Way" of Therese of Lisieux is an explicit renunciation of all exalted and disincarnate spiritualities that divide man against him self, putting one half in the realm of angels and the other in an earthly hell. For Chuang Tzu, as for the Gospel, to lose one's life is to save it, and to seek to save it for one's own sake is to lose it. There is an affirmation of the world that is nothing but ruin and loss. There is a renunciation of the world that finds and saves man in his own home, which is God's world. In any event, the "way" of Chuang Tzu is mysterious because it is so simple that it can get along without being a way at all. Least of all is it a "way out." Chuang Tzu would have agreed with St. John of the Cross, that you enter upon this kind of way when you leave all ways and, in some sense, get lost."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Activists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesAutobiographers from the United StatesTheologians from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"A Note To The Reader".
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Thomas Merton
36 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Thomas Merton →
Related Quotes
"Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments."
"A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It “consents,” so …"
"The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which ar…"
"I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the e…"
"Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of thing…"
"This new language of prayer has to come out of something which transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the im…"
"The biggest human temptation is … to settle for too little."
"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, i…"
"When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them—and that is of course because they accept the system and…"
"Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, th…"