My Way: The Way of the White Clouds (1995)
Context: 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.
"The American Dance", in Modern Dance, ed. Virginia Stewart (1945).
“Belief in mysteries, any manner of mysteries, is the only lasting luxury in life.”
Source: The Witches of Worm
“Don't look for mysteries. I give you pure joy.”
Brâncuși cited in: Horst Woldemar Janson, Anthony F. Janson (2004) History of Art: The Western Tradition.
Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 304
“Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved”
Source: Big Stone Gap
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.”
Attributed to Merton in a number of sources, the earliest located being Studia mystica, Volumes 5-6 (1982), p. 76 http://books.google.com/books?id=59EYAAAAIAAJ&q=%22problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor. 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 http://books.google.com/books?id=CghAQDPahhcC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA152#v=onepage&q&f=false. 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 http://books.google.com/books?id=OFdVAAAAMAAJ&q=%22not+a+problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor.
Misattributed
“To people at large, life inside the harem was a mystery.”
Historical essays (2001)
