Thomas Merton

As a part of my rule of life, I pray the hours 4 times a day. I go to Mission St. Claire, generally, and read the book of common prayer liturgy “The Daily Office” online through them.

Today, the church calendar tells me that we celebrate Thomas Merton, a St. of the Church. Some of his writings have deeply impacted me. Here are a few great quotes from Merton.
.
“[A publisher asked me to write something on ‘The Secret of Success,’ and I refused.] If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. … If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. If a university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably failing in its obligation to society and to the students themselves.”
.
“War represents a vice that mankind would like to get rid of but which it cannot do without. Man is like an alcoholic who knows that drink will destroy him but who always has a reason for drinking. So with war.”
.
“The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated graduates–people literaly unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call ‘life’.”
.
He’s a freak!