“You, too, can become a mendicant for the Lord. Open your heart and hands to God. Pray in silence and then enter the cloister of the world without expectations and let God provide you with your thoughts, words, and right actions. When you live from your inner hermit, God will fill you with a spiritual abundance beyond anything that you ever dreamed possible.”
Talbot, John Michael. The World is My Cloister: Living From the Hermit Within. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), pages 80-81.
“But, praise God, it is now clear to me that a person who forgets what he has said has not prayed well. In a good prayer one fully remembers every word and thought from the beginning to the end of the prayer.”
Luther, Martin. “A Simple Way to Pray” (1535) Luther’s Works Vol. 42. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), page 199.
“In active contemplation, a man becomes able to live within himself. He learns to be at home with his thoughts. He becomes to a greater and greater degree independent of exterior supports. His mind is pacified not by passive dependence on things outside himself–diversions, entertainments, conversations, business–but by its own constructive activity. That is to say, that he derives inner satisfaction from spiritual creativeness: thinking his own thoughts, reaching his own conclusions, looking at his own life and directing it in accordance with his own inner truth, discovered in meditation and under the eyes of God.”
Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. NY: HarperOne, 2003 [the text belongs to 1959!], page 59.
Pathology: the Study of a Path 