“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
Variant: Art enables us to find ourselves and loose ourselves at the same time.
Source: No Man Is an Island
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Thomas Merton 92
Priest and author 1915–1968Related quotes

Las Menias
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970)
Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

This Business of Living (1935-1950)
Source: Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
Context: When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

X magazine (1959-62)
Context: There is a sense, and a very exciting sense, in which art is moral. When Stendhal says a good picture is nothing but a construction in ethics, one recognises a truth about art which opens up vistas that are at the same time liberating and terrifying. The ethics of art are terrifying because real art by increasing our knowledge of ourselves increases in exactly the same proportion the ethical commitment.

D 89
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

Variant: For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.
Source: 100 Selected Poems