Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on the ‘Thing I Want To Live For’)

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. The better answer he has, the more of a person he is.”—Thomas Merton quoted in M. Basil Pennington, Thomas Merton: Brother Monk: The Quest for True Freedom (1987)

Quote of the Day (Ivan Turgenev, on the Basic Questions)

“What aim do you wish to achieve, where are you going, what is in your soul? In a word, who are you? What are you?”— Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1861)

The kind of questions it would take a 19^th-century Russian novel to pose! Only the biggest ones we face, and still unanswered, a century and a half after they were asked…

(The image accompanying this post comes from an 1874 oil-on-canvas portrait of Ivan Turgenev by Ilya Repin, now in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.)