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Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
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Attributed to Merton in a number of sources, the earliest located being Studia mystica, Volumes 5-6 (1982), p. 76. This does not attribute a direct quote to Merton, but says "To use another of Merton's favorite distinctions, for Furlong Merton's life is seen principally as a problem to be solved, which it was, in the final analysis, successfully, rather than a mystery to be lived". The next-earliest source located is the 1998 book The Artist's Way at Work: Riding the Dragon by Mark Bryan and Julia Cameron, which attributes the exact quote to Merton on p. 152. In reality this seems to be a slightly altered version of the quote "The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved; it is a reality to be experienced" which appeared in the 1928 book The Conquest of Illusion by Jacobus Johannes Leeuw, p. 9.

 

Thomas Merton

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Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

Look for the mysterious in life. Wherever you look — in the white clouds, in the stars in the night, in the flowers, in a flowing river — wherever you look, look for the mystery. And whenever you find that a mystery is there, meditate on it. Meditation means: dissolve yourself before that mystery, annihilate yourself before that mystery, disperse yourself before that mystery. Be no more, and let the mystery be so total that you are absorbed in it. And suddenly a new door opens, a new perception is achieved.

 

Osho

 

The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.

 

Immanuel Kant

 

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

 

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