Thomas Merton
Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which... are just the opposite of what we were made for?Collection: Opposites
In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.Collection: Wisdom
But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.Collection: Wisdom
No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.Collection: Spiritual
To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.Collection: Joy
The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.Collection: Men
One opens the inner doors of one's heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all.Collection: Heart
To be a saint is to be yourself.Collection: Being Yourself
God has brought me to Kentucky...the precise place he has chosen for my sanctification.Collection: Kentucky
A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of "choice" when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses.Collection: Freedom
You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image except the Image of the Invisible Father.Collection: Father
Are they moved by a sense of human need for silence, for reflection, for inner seeking? So they want to get away from the noise and tension of modern life, at least for a little while, in order to relax their minds and wills and seek a blessed healing sense of inner unity, reconciliation, integration?Collection: Blessed
Love winter when the plant says nothing.Collection: Winter
To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ.Collection: Wisdom
O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.Collection: Love
The lights of prayer that make us imagine we are beginning to be angels are sometimes only signs that we are finally beginning to be men. We do not have a high enough opinion of our own nature. We think we are at the gates of heaven and we are only just beginning to come into our own realm as free and intelligent beings.Collection: Wisdom
Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.Collection: Christian
Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.Collection: Reality
Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind.Collection: Men
Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.Collection: Spiritual
One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.Collection: Sweet
That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.Collection: People
And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals.Collection: Wisdom
His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.Collection: Wisdom
Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing," the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.Collection: Circles
We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will.Collection: Eye
Love is a special way of being alive.Collection: Love Is
In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate.Collection: Love
In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar.Collection: Wisdom
The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television.Collection: Children
It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as "new men" regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will.Collection: Wisdom
The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.Collection: Purpose
"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.Collection: Jobs
In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.Collection: Important
Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.Collection: Love Is
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.Collection: Compassion
Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.Collection: Thinking
Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.Collection: Wisdom
In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work with expecting immediate reward, to love without an instant satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition. It is only when we are detached from ourselves that we can be at peace with ourselves.Collection: Order
In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your piece of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and there is no joy in things that do not exist.Collection: Heart
How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?Collection: Thinking
Weaknesses and deficiencies . . . play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.Collection: Play
Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.Collection: Doors
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.Collection: Life
The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers [and Sisters], 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.Collection: Brother
The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.Collection: Hate
Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.Collection: Wisdom
It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself!Collection: War