"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."
React to this quote
More by Thomas Merton
See allResonant Thoughts
"But this instinctive falsification of the world view is only of limited effectiveness. Again and again the ressentiment man encounters happiness, power, beauty, wit, goodness, and other phenomena of p…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"Miracles are the swaddling-clothes of infant churches."
— Thomas Fuller"I've always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He'd have given us bigger behinds to sit on…"
— P. J. O'Rourke"Where God hath a temple, the Devil will have a chapel."
— Robert Burton"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary …"
— H. L. Mencken"The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand; there I represented it in the reeds."
— Caspar David Friedrich"I for one would never be a party, unless the law were clear, to saying to any man who put forward his views…"
— John Coleridge
Related Thinkers
Related Topics
Deep Dives
- Martin Luther on religion
- Fulton J. Sheen on religion
- Mother Teresa on religion
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on religion
- Edwin Abbott Abbott on religion
- Evagrius Ponticus on religion
- Henry Melvill on religion
- Eugen Drewermann on religion
- Martin Luther on justice
- Martin Luther on knowledge
- knowledge & Beauty
- knowledge & Change


