Thomas Merton:
One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience himself as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they "know" from the beginning will never, in fact, come to know anything.
Thomas Merton. Contemplative Prayer (New York: Doubleday): 37.
We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!
Contemplative Prayer: 37.