I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I fee… - Thomas Merton

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I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or to anyone else. He is far too great to need any apologies from me. … His philosophical temper is, I believe, profoundly original and sane. It can of course be misunderstood. But it is basically simple and direct. It seeks, as does all the greatest philosophical thought, to go immediately to the heart of things. Chuang Tzu is not concerned with words and formulas about reality, but with the direct existential grasp of reality in itself. Such a grasp is necessarily obscure and does not lend itself to abstract analysis. It can be presented in a parable, a fable, or a funny story about a conversation between two philosophers.

Thomas Merton

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About Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton (31 January 1915 – 10 December 1968) was one of the most influential Catholic authors of the 20th century. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, in the U.S. state of Kentucky, Merton was an acclaimed Catholic theologian, poet, author and social activist.

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Alternative Names: Thomas Feverel Merton • Father Louis

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Simone Weil Søren Kierkegaard C. S. Lewis Friedrich Nietzsche Miguel de Unamuno

Additional quotes by Thomas Merton

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

It brings to the West a salutary reminder that our highly activistic and one-sided culture is faced with a crisis that may end in self-destruction because it lacks the inner depth of an authentic metaphysical consciousness. Without such depth, our moral and political protestations are just so verbiage. If, in the West, God can no longer be experienced as other than "dead", it is because of an inner split and self-alienation which have characterized the Western mind in its single-minded dedication to only the half of life: that which is exterior, objective and quantitative.

Everybody makes fun of virtue, which by now has, as its primary meaning, an affectation of prudery practiced by hypocrites and the impotent.

I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or to anyone else. He is far too great to need … - Thomas Merton

About Thomas Merton

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