Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.
Epictetus·110 ADFirst say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.
Marcus Aurelius·180 ADYes, you can--if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.
Thomas Merton·1958Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard.
