Top 46 Roland Merullo Quotes
#1. We see our troubles through the filter of our own imperfection ...
Roland Merullo
#2. The past shouts at you, the ugly words or actions echo down across the years.
Roland Merullo
#3. try if you can to not stay in the small box of old thinking.
Roland Merullo
#4. 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
#5. 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
#7. Anger is like hands over your eyes when another person is trying to show you.
Roland Merullo
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Isn't the spiritual search, at its essence, a movement toward objectivity?
Roland Merullo
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. ...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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting others
Roland Merullo
#29. 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
#30. Resist fear," Jesus said. "Fear is always in the future. Cut through it. Resist it.
Roland Merullo
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable.
Roland Merullo
#40. I mused about the human phenomenon that went by the title "organized religion." What, I wondered, was disorganized religion?
Roland Merullo
#41. 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
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. The realm of human understanding is the only realm most of us have access to, I said.
Roland Merullo
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