Quotes by Thomas Merton

• 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.
• 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.
• The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
• 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 least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.
• 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 tighter you squeeze, the less you have.
• The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
• 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.
• When ambition ends, happiness begins.
• 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.
• 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.
• We do not exist for ourselves.
• We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
• We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
• 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.
• 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.
• Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
• 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.
• To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
• 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.
• A daydream is an evasion.
• 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.
• Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
• Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone-we find it with another.
• Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.
• Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
• 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.
• Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
• 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.
• Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
• Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
• Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
• 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.
• 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.
• Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
• If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
• 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.
• We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with each other.
• Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.