Oscura

“May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.”

“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

“Culture is fundamental. Literature saves you. Cinema saves you.”

“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.”

““The highest and most beautiful things are not to be read about or seen, but to be lived.””

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”

“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart, and learn to love the questions themselves.”

“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”

“I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within.”

“If a man does not know the value of his own loneliness, how can he respect another’s solitude?”

““At the heart of Merton’s spirituality is his distinction between our real and false selves. Our false selves are the identities we cultivate in order to function in society with pride and self-possession; our real selves are a deep religious mystery, known entirely only to God. The world cultivates the false self, ignores the real one, and therein lies the great irony of human existence: the more we make of ourselves, the less we actually exist.”

“Integrity has no need of rules.”