Alla Sobirova > Alla's Quotes

“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat . . . Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.”
― Aristotle