Fr.Dr.Thomas Kottoor

Some lives are shaped by thunderous events. Mine, I realise now, was shaped by sentences ,short, luminous lines that entered softly and stayed for a lifetime.

As a young boy, I encountered the power of words through my father, a history teacher of rare calibre. One day he handed me a sturdy two-hundred-page notebook. On the cover he wrote a simple title: General Knowledge. His instruction was equally simple and quietly prophetic: Write your ambitions. Write your goals. Write the quotes that inspire you.

That notebook became my first inner map.

At the heart of it, like a family crest, was my father’s own guiding line our unwritten motto: “Hard work is the key to success.” It was not merely advice; it was an ethic, a way of standing upright before life.

Growing up in the baby boomer generation, I absorbed certain words that seemed to belong not just to individuals, but to history itself. Three quotes left an indelible mark on my young mind: •

“I have a dream.” — Martin Luther King Jr. •

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” — Thomas Alva Edison •

And, inevitably, echoing at home and within: “Hard work is the key to success.” These were not slogans to me.

They were calls to hope, to effort, to responsibility.

Later, as a student of theology, my imagination was set aflame by a line from St. Irenaeus that still resonates in my bones: “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” Faith, I learned, was not an escape from life, but a deep invitation into it.

At my priestly ordination, one sentence from the Gospel of John quietly crystallised into my philosophy of life: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10) Not survival. Not mere existence. But fullness.

Recently, in the vast, restless sea of the internet, another quote surfaced,unexpected, timely, and strangely intimate. From Albert Einstein, that unparalleled mind of the last century: “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

In our AI-driven, rapidly shifting digital age, this line feels uncannily apt. Stillness now is not peace; it is imbalance. Growth demands motion. Meaning requires engagement.

Looking back, I see a quiet thread running through all these words. They lean upward. They urge becoming. They affirm that life-like the universe itself-is unfinished, expanding, evolving.

We are all, each day, in the process of becoming. So too is the world. So too is the cosmos.

These quotes taught me to embrace growth, to engage the world rather than retreat from it, to honour effort, hope, and movement. They taught me that faith and intelligence, labour and grace, discipline and dream, belong together.

And so, if I may add one line of my own to that old notebook of life, it would be this:

“Be the best you can be “ fully alive, faithfully moving, and courageously becoming.