Success Quote by Thomas Merton

Merton’s line feels like a paradox on purpose: art as both mirror and trapdoor. Coming from a Trappist monk who fled the noise of modern life for a cloister, the sentence is less a soft-focus celebration of “creativity” than a spiritual technology report. Art, at its best, produces a double movement. “Find ourselves” gestures toward recognition: the sudden click when a painting, a poem, or a piece of music names a feeling you didn’t have language for. It’s identity-making, but not in the Instagram sense; it’s the slow uncovering of what has been buried under habit, anxiety, and performance.

Then Merton flips it: “lose ourselves.” That’s the real tell. In his world, losing the self isn’t failure; it’s relief. The ego, the managerial voice that keeps score and narrates, gets interrupted. The subtext is anti-possessive: art isn’t something you “use” to brand your personality, it’s something you submit to until your usual boundaries blur. That’s why the line works rhetorically - it sets up a familiar promise (self-discovery) and smuggles in a more demanding one (self-forgetting).

Context matters here: mid-century America was busy selling selfhood as a project - productivity, status, the curated life. Merton’s paradox counters that with a contemplative premise: the self you “find” through art may only appear once the self you cling to loosens its grip.