I have been blessed with lots of great quotes coming my way via email. I have devoted a number of pages to quotes from: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Various other Quotes.
Quotes are like emails. They must be read in the present context, what they are saying to us now. Like emails we cannot recreate the voice they were spoken in. They are frozen words that, if we hear them in the present, they can make sense. Perhaps they are not heard as the author meant them to be. But good quotes are timeless glimpses deep in the present moment.
I am in process of updating my quotes. Here are some new ones and check the pages in a week or so for more.
Various Quotes.
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” —Rosa Parks born Feb.4, 1913; she was 42 when she refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery AL.
“Today the first and perhaps the only duty of the philosopher ‘is to defend man against himself: to defend man against that’ extraordinary temptation toward inhumanity to which — almost without being aware of it — so many human beings today have yielded.”— Gabriel Marcel.
Thomas Merton
“We live in crisis, and perhaps we find it interesting to do so. Yet we also feel guilty about it, as if we ought not to be in crisis. As if we were so wise, so able, so kind, so reasonable, that crisis ought at all times to be unthinkable. It is doubtless this “ought,” this “should” that makes our era so interesting that it cannot possibly be a time of wisdom, or even of reason. We think we know what we ought to be doing, and we see ourselves move, with the inexorable deliberation of a machine that has gone wrong, to do the opposite.” — Thomas Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, New York: Image, page 66
“The basic problem is not political, it is a-political and human. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics: the human dimension which politics pretend to arrogate entirely to themselves. This is the necessary first step along the long way toward the perhaps impossible task of purifying, humanizing and somehow illuminating politics themselves.” — Letter from Thomas Merton to Jim Forest, August 27, 1962:
Dorothy Day
“Paper work, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens — these things, too, are the works of peace, and often seem like a very little way.”
— Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage, December 1965
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