Thomas Merton

The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.

I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.

Love is our true destiny. We do not find meaning of life by ourselves alone we find it with another.

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us only as a gift and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt

If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts.

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.

To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.

When you expect the world to end at any moment you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time you do your work well.

Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.

We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.

Humility is the surest sign of strength.

By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.

Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.

The goal of fasting is inner unity.

The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.

The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings which are all part of one another and all involved in one another.

We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.

If you have never had any distractions you dont know how to pray.

O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.

Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.

Contemplation means rest suspension of activity withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.

We do not exist for ourselves.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.

Not all of us are called to be hermits but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

he beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.

In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate.

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

A daydream is an evasion.

Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty.

October is a fine and dangerous season in America . . . a wonderful time to begin anything at all.

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.

When ambition ends, happiness begins.

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone-we find it with another.

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.

He who is controlled by objects loses possession of his inner self: if he no longer values himself, how can he value others? If he no longer values others, he is abandoned. He has nothing left!

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.

Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is a spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being

The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.

Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way.

The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.