Famous Quotes & Sayings

Roland Merullo Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 68 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Roland Merullo.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 868105

My father he always say that the oil is already inside the student, already there from all time. The teacher only has a match and makes it light, and then the student isn't a student anymore, just a friend, going the same way down the dark road but seeing now by himself. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 414444

Resist fear," Jesus said. "Fear is always in the future. Cut through it. Resist it. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1473597

There are some kinds of sorrow that words can never reach, certain kinds of things you can never hold in the box of your thoughts, certain kinds of pain you can't soften in other people. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1197582

The realm of human understanding is the only realm most of us have access to, I said. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1166987

try if you can to not stay in the small box of old thinking. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1095914

Without really intending to, without really thinking about where it might lead, I said, "How does one get one's mind clean?"
That is the very best question, my friend. The answer is a simple answer, but very hard also: Live a good life. Help people. Meditate. Live another good life. Meditate some more. Don't hurt. Don't hurt. Don't hurt. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1376881

That if she clears her mind down to the deepest level then three things will happen: she'll never be afraid; it will be easier to love people; and it will be easier to die. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1521292

Isn't mockery the province of the insecure? — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1451970

A fair portion of my anger had returned, but alongside it ran the memory of those few seconds on the yoga mat in the death pose. I felt as if I had been shown a kind of essential secret, something so subtle and quiet and small(and yet so important)that I could gone my entire adult life and never even imagined such a thing existed. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 2185130

There's about six original people in the world. The rest of everybody else are copycats. When it comes to religion and politics, ninety percent of people do what their parents did and think they made up their minds for themselves. They watch the news to see what the latest trends are. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 205194

I think sometimes this is why we meditate, because when we meditate we can make the thoughts slow, and in between the thoughts is becomes a space, and in this space you have maybe something like the emptiness, the not-any-word. Maybe then we start, just a little bit start, not finish, to see the mystery without the clothes on. The naked mystery of life. We start to see the world a little bit that it is not separate one thing from the other, one person from the other, that it is maybe all the energy of the mind of the Divine Engineer, everything connected." To — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 84646

You keep telling yourself it will be different. Year after year, time after time, you keep telling yourself things might change. It's what makes people go back to people they shouldn't ever go back to. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1641344

I've been out here pondering the meaning of life." "That bad, huh?" "Not so bad. They're good kids. Just drifting out into their own orbits already. It's natural, it's right. Though I guess I have this image ... I don't know ... " "Of some perfect, endless family life?" she said. "All happiness and McDonald's commercials?" "No McDonald's, but, yeah, I guess so. Something that doesn't just dissolve in a burst of cell phones and grumpiness, then whoosh away into biannual visits." "You're — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1280410

Anger is like hands over your eyes when another person is trying to show you. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 488821

I thought I heard a cow mooing in Seese's back yard. Later on, later down the road, as they say, I would learn that this was the sound of the Rinpoche chanting some ancient prayer. But, at that moment, it sounded to me very much like a mooing cow. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1922517

Some point you had to risk the ridicule of the mob, of your own internalized voices, and try to see clearly what had been set in front of you in this life, and try to act on that as bravely and honestly as you could, no matter what kind of rules you'd previously been living by. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1460168

Sour taste of obligation postponed, — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 185971

I came to be emulated. That's what people didn't get. Followed, as in being an example, as in making your interior world resemble mine. p. 22 — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 274619

When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 2111290

There was a small glass vase between us, three gladioli in a few ounces of water. One of the gladioli had dropped a petal- brushstroke of purple on fine white cloth. Rinpoche drank the last sip of his tea, then set the cup aside, took the petal with his thumb and second finger, placed it on the middle of the saucer in front of him, and turned the cup upside down to cover it.
"I feel a lesson coming on," I said ...
"The flower is the good inside every person," he said. "The cup is like a wall, to protect. Many people have that wall."
"Armor" I said. He nodded.
"Why?"
"Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 377383

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. - James Baldwin — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 557323

I studied him the way I studied all the people in my life, noticing the changes of his mood, the times when the edge of his patience came into view, even small physical details like the sickle-shaped scar on the top of his right forearm and the small flourish he made with his hand whenever he set down a tool, as if he was brushing bad air away from it. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1532653

It was becoming clear to me that what Jesus wanted from us was not pious obedience to a narrow set of rules, but a smart, limitless openmindedness that allowed us--in real life, in actual day-to-day , modern American life--to treat the other person the way we would want to be treated--Gay people, Jewish people, dumb people, rich people, poor people, women, men, right-wingers, liberals, soldiers, and antiwar protesters, maybe even animals--we were supposed to see through the disguise they were wearing, all the down to the I AM in them. That was it. That was the the big commandment, I was almost sure. p. 153 — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1665196

You have to take a little time to appreciate being alive and breathing instead of wondering what you have to do next all the time. You have to stop and do nothing for a little while every day. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 883326

Families are like countries. They have their own language and jokes and secrets and assumptions about the right and wrong ways of doing things, and some of that always shows in the children, the way something of
Germany or Australia always shows in a German or an Australian, no matter where they go. Outsiders like it or they don't, they feel at home there or they don't. It's like the taste of cilantro.
Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 981936

Now, at a point when the entire world seems mired in violence and cynicism, when the Church is shrinking, the environment being poisoned, when good souls are giving up hope, when greed and bitterness seem to be gaining at the expense of kindness and compassion - now, I believe, we have been given a divine help. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1440216

His eyes were more intense, the gaze more intimate. He put just the last inch or so of the fingers of both hands on the table to either side of his plate and said, Love makes them run. That is not my lineage, my idea. That is a fact just like when water gets cold it ices. Like that. Some people cannot see this is a fact, but this is. They are blind in different ways but this is a fact: Love makes the atoms go where they go and stick where they stick. Everybody when they see a baby, a small boy or girl, they smile? Why? Because inside themself they know this fact. They know love made this baby, this boy, this girl. They feel this natural rising up of love in themself. Okay, yes? Before, I said to you about God's music that is playing all the time, for everyone. God's music is this love. And this love that runs our world, sometimes it means that there is help coming from that love, from that ... source you would — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1583402

Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting others — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1528290

Our national obsession with sex (and if you don't think there is a national obsession with sex, just browse the magazine racks in the local chain bookstore) is really nothing more than a profound spiritual longing in disguise: the desire to exhaust all other desires and feel loved and sated, at peace with our fragmented modern selves, linked to those around us. At peace, at rest. I wonder, sometimes, if the same deep desire lies at the heart of addiction to drugs, to drink, to eating, to work: are we all just desperately looking for some strategy that will get us past the shoals of modern existence and safely into that imagined, calm port? — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1730172

I like that kind of thing. I like warmth and uncalled-for kindness, the small unnoticed generosities that speckle the meanness of the world. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1650515

If I look at you" - he pointed to a very old woman who seemed to be teetering in her chair on the far left-hand end of the first row - "and I see not woman, not person, but piece of the energy of God, the same energy that is inside me, how can I hurt you? How can I able to think bad on you? No. You see?" The — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1707823

I miss women," he went on. "I miss that kind of intimacy. But I think whatever people do; they do in search of pleasure. Or trying to get rid of pain or fear, which is the same thing, basically. Everything, everything is really about that. Everything is about bringing your mind to a place where it's at peace — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1376843

Simply by being your absolute, most genuine self in every interaction of every hour, you provide a great and rare service on this earth. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1751267

What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly the same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part. What you do. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1768934

I decided that if I was worth anything as a person, I ought to be able to let her be with what it was she had to be with then: not urge her to fight it if she was tired of fighting, not ply her with hope, not make her think about who might be upset or worried, not ask anything of her, nothing, just be alive with her while she was still alive. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1782095

How, I wondered, could a fifteen-year-old boy act like this without getting his ass kicked every time he opened his mouth? — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1846129

The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1852875

In fact, it is the account of an interior voyage, the kind of excursion that's hard to talk about without sounding foolish or annoyingly serene, or like someone who thinks the Great Spirit has singled him out to be the mouthpiece of ultimate truth. If you knew me you'd know that I am none of the above. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1870140

All-American and proud of it. Too rich and soft and flawed to make any spiritual mark on anyone other than my own dog and children ... on a good day. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1890633

I mused about the human phenomenon that went by the title "organized religion." What, I wondered, was disorganized religion? — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1911143

I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the poor, and the abused from so many other nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1976330

it occurred to me that the modern spiritual leaders of my tradition were always somber, self-important men, thickly coated in others' idea of who they were supposed to be. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 2181241

...if we somehow find the courage to go directly into the discomfort - even the discomfort of illness, pain, old age, and death - we might discover something unexpected there. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 2227341

Isn't the spiritual search, at its essence, a movement toward objectivity? — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 671294

If Christ's message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 101588

When we were first together, when you first brought me here to this beautiful place, you used to say you were glad you found a napoletana, remember? You said the northerners were sane and orderly and hardworking and maybe more honest, but that without the south, Italy would have too many brains and not enough heart. It would be like Europe having only Germany and Austria - no Spain, no France, no Italy. It would be a world of scientists without singers. I thought it was romantic. What happened to the man who said those things? — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 151944

The number of poor, and poorly prepared, students who succeed in college and beyond undercuts the simplistic notion that economic or educational disadvantage is an excuse for failure, violent behavior, or indulgence in drugs. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 350762

I am not one of these people who wants everyone to live the way I live. What causes more trouble on our troubled earth than people like that? — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 401406

I'm not great at talking to people. I have all these thoughts bunching up inside my head and then they come out like a dam bursting or something. I'm sorry. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 427204

Womb? ... I mean ... does your lineage — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 460167

God couldn't possibly love my father and hate my mother, or vice versa; that God was bigger than our ideas about him and greater than any name we might call him. p. 6 — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 480972

Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 491129

The past shouts at you, the ugly words or actions echo down across the years. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 498739

It was like being in the start of an earthquake. Before that, whatever else happened, however bad things had been, you were at least sure the ground would stay still. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 596047

That girl was not treated well, and when anyone is hurt like that - especially a child - the hurt burrows down inside and makes a kind of museum there, with images of the bad times displayed on every wall. Some people try to forget the museum exits and keep their mind occupied with drink or drugs or food, or by staying busy with work or they chase one kind of excitement after another, while memories fester there in the dark. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 620768

It's like the difference between a kid who goes to school and learns and a kid who goes to school and learns and comes home to parents who are reading to her and talking to her about the world, showing her things, teaching by their actions. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1464884

There are teachers who say that one of the main obstacles, spiritual obstacles, for westerners is a sense of unworthiness, a self-limiting sense of what's possible for them in a human life. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 749578

To me, enlightenment is a big shift inside your eyes, a different way to use your mind so you can understand some of God, some of Jesus. But it is maybe not one shift, but many small shifts. You change your spiritual condition - by prayer, by meditation, by the way you live, the way you decide to think, by the lessons you learn in living this life with a good intention - and then, when this happens, after a long times or a short times, the way you see the world changes. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 793905

It doesn't take a majority to change a society, or a faith. Only a small minority that yells, threatens, kills, that is willing to do anything to prove to themselves that they're right. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 806022

I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1088139

You ask a certain question again and again, in a sincere fashion, and the answer appears. But, in my experience, at least, that answer arrives according to it's own mysterious celestial timing, and often in disguise. And it comes in a way you're not prepared for, or don't want, or can't at first, accept. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1149252

With two teenagers in the house, we sometimes experience a degree of domestic turbulence that sounds, to my ear, like a boiling teakettle filled with hormones shrieking on a stove. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1196475

The real work was the identification of those aspects of yourself that led to what he called "the negative emotions" - anger, envy, bitterness, greed, cynicism, hatred and the like - things that poured hurt into an already overfull world. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1286677

When you have known someone your whole life you don't need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1437376

We have a tradition in Tibet. Sacred craziness. Men and women who act in a strange way. People think they are fools, but their wisdom, in fact, is more than those we call normal. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1438398

We hadn't yet traded freedom for comfort. — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1457175

We see our troubles through the filter of our own imperfection ... — Roland Merullo

Roland Merullo Quotes 1458890

There is...a golden alpine field within each of you, a place where you are bathed in approval, not because of anything particular you have done, but simply because of your own sacred nature. If you had a president who could show you the route to that place, what a difference it would make in your lives, and in the culture of the world! — Roland Merullo