Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Merton

The meaning of life is found in openness to being and "being present" in full awareness.

Thomas Merton

The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis, but first of all by living. For until we have begun to live our prudence has no material to work on. And until we have begun to fail we have no way of working out our success.

Thomas Merton

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

Thomas Merton

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!

Thomas Merton

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

Thomas Merton

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.

Thomas Merton

Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.

Thomas Carlyle

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Thomas Carlyle

Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know theyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.

Thomas Carlyle

The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.

Thomas Carlyle

There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

Thomas Carlyle

Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was mine, My Dear! That love of yours was mine.

Thomas Carlyle

Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.

Thomas Carlyle

Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.

Thomas Carlyle

Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.

Thomas Carlyle

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Thomas Carlyle

Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him, and force on him, a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten, though a circuitous, course. A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing, and, tempted, is too likely to guide it ill.

Thomas Carlyle

The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.

Thomas Carlyle

To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?

Thomas Carlyle

He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.

Thomas Carlyle

In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people's disputes but he heartily repented of it.

Thomas Carlyle

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

Thomas Carlyle

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Thomas Carlyle

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Thomas Carlyle

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

Thomas Carlyle

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

Tony Curtis

You wanna know the secret of life? The saliva of young girls.

Tony Campolo

Most of us are tiptoeing through life so we can reach death safely. We should be praying, "If I should wake before I die. . . ." Life can get away from you.

Tom Wolfe

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Steven Hill

Extreme Makeover... they help people that are uncomfortable in their own skin. They really change lives.

Stephen Hawking

What I have learned from life is to make the most of what you have got.

Stephen Hawking

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Stephen King

If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?