The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image.
Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.
If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.
But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.
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.
Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.
A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.
Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
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.
Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.
Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.
The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds
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.
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.
Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real
What we have to be is what we are.
Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat . . . Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that.
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.
Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost
The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.
I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.
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.
The least of learning is done in the classrooms.
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.
The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept.
For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.
Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.
Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.
A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.
![We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/thomas-merton-52994.jpg)
We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!
"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.
The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.
In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.
For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.
For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness
Art enables us to find ourselves and loose ourselves at the same time.
Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.
Whose silence are you?
The end of the world will be legal.
The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.
....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.
The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68
There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.
This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.
The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable
We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.
Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage.
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!
There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.
We have what we seek. We don't have to rush after it. It was there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us.
I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected
Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.
In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.
How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.
To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything He has given us — and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38
But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact pleases You.
Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God you have found.
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.
Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night.
It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.
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.
It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.
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.
To be unknown to God is entirely too much privacy.
I find I serve the world best by keeping my distance and freedom.
The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.
But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others.
What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.
There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.
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How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man's city?(100)
It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common.
Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
Where self-interest is the bond, The friendship is dissolved When calamity comes. Where Tao is the bond, Friendship is made perfect By calamity.
The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.
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
For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.
People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22
The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is.
Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love.
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.
There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise.
Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.
