Quotes by Thomas Merton
Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
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.
Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.
Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
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.
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.
Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
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 biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
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.
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.
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.
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
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.
Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
A daydream is an evasion.
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
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 have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
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.
Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
