Thomas Merton Quotes

Fate has a strange way of making plans.

Life is about making plans from which you deviate, almost always. If you are lucky, you do come up with a plan.

It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.

The one thing we know about the future is that it will not be like today. I don't think that people should be too anxious about not knowing what they are going to do in the future, because we really can't know.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

World events move from the seemingly impossible to the possible.

Who likes surprises? Nobody I know likes surprises. But facts change on the ground.

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

Much of what we're going to try will not work, and much of what does work will do so for unanticipated reasons.

Like life, the beauty of sports is that no two periods are identical.

I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.

It's good to plan, but you just never know.

I've lost a lot of control in my life.

On the first feature, everything's new. No matter what you're doing, it's a new experience, and you don't really have control over it, in a way, because you just don't know how things work.

Fate occasionally touches us all in ways we don't always understand.

When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.

The only thing that can be safely predicted is that sometime soon your organization will be challenged to change in ways for which it has no precedent.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

Nothing works until it does. Nobody knows anything. You don't know what people are going to respond to. People are always surprised by stuff.

We always seem to be surprised by events, especially by catastrophes, but also by wonderful events. Look at 1990, the year that the Soviet Union collapsed and apartheid in South Africa collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. I don't know anyone who foresaw those events. It seems to me that as a species we are constantly trying to adapt ourselves to the unexpected. In the meantime, we talk as if we are in control, and we're not. This seems to me to be the truth about the twentieth century.

Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand?

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

For something that is static, fixed, dead, there can be a way or a definite path; but not for anything that is moving and living.