Thomas Merton
“Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.”
Thomas Merton Quotes
“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.”
“There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being.”
“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.”
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.”
“As long as you are content to be nobody in particular, and content not to have anything, you are quite a free being. To be free from conventions, from the feeling that you have to say this or do that, is to be free in a profoundly important sense.”
“The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept.”
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.”
“Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.”
“For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be obedient to His direction in our life.”
“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.”
“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.”
“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 very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God’s mercy to me.”
“The likings and dislikings of society, or of authority, mean nothing to me. No true spiritual life is possible without a spirit of detachment.”
“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.”
“We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time.”
“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”
“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.”
