A Quote by Thomas Merton
But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.
Related Quotes
To be a scientist you have to be willing to live with uncertainty for a long time. Research scientists begin with a question and they take a decade or two to find an answer. Then the answer they get may not even answer the question they thought it would. You have to have a supple enough mind to be open to the possibility that the answer sometimes precedes the question itself.
In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.
In silence a question has great power, because in silence a question will always lead you deeper into your experience. If there is no grounding in silence, a spiritual question is going to lead you into your mind.
Intellectuals know how to answer the question, 'What God do I believe in?' not only through the question of 'What God do I abhor?' Intellectuals can also answer the question of 'What flag do I wave?' without having to answer the question of 'What flag do I burn.'
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
There is nothing there - no soul - there is only this question about after death. The question has to die now to find the answer - your answer; not my answer - because the question is born out of the assumption, the belief, that there is something to continue after death.
Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?
A dialogue is very important. It is a form of communication in which question and answer continue till a question is left without an answer. Thus the question is suspended between the two persons involved in this answer and question. It is like a bud with untouched blossoms . . . If the question is left totally untouched by thought, it then has its own answer because the questioner and answerer, as persons, have disappeared. This is a form of dialogue in which investigation reaches a certain point of intensity and depth, which then has a quality that thought can never reach.
The first question we usually ask new parents is : “Is it a boy or a girl ?”. There is a great answer to that one going around : “We don’t know ; it hasn’t told us yet.” Personally, I think no question containing “either/or” deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender.
When a question has no correct answer, there is only one honest response. The gray area between yes and no. Silence.
When silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate "why," that great "why" is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out.
We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.
An approximate answer to the right question is worth far more than a precise answer to the wrong one.
As long as I can remember I feel I have had this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence, greater than determination, greater than vision. It is all these combined. My brain becomes magnetized with this dominating force which I hold in my hand.
If music is sound & came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.
The importance of the question and the availability of an answer are two different things. I'm not willing to state that because the question is fundamental, therefore I possess the answer. And I'm certainly not willing to say that since I don't possess the answer, I'll pretend that I do.
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