quotes by Thomas Merton

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image."
— Thomas Merton

"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. "
— Thomas Merton

"For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs."
— Thomas Merton

"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. The Seven Storey Mountain"
— Thomas Merton

""Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love."
"
— Thomas Merton (Passion for Peace; Reflections on War and Nonviolence)

""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 you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.""
— Thomas Merton

"The end of the world will be legal."
— Thomas Merton

"Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity."
— Thomas Merton

"“The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.”
"
— Thomas Merton

"In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question."
— Thomas Merton (New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions Paperbook))

"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."
— Thomas Merton

"....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."
— Thomas Merton

""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.""
— Thomas Merton

"To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succomb to violence."
— Thomas Merton

"“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”"
— Thomas Merton

"If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men--you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead."
— Thomas Merton (Seeds of Contemplation)

"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems."
— Thomas Merton

"To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times."
— Thomas Merton

"“The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscuirty, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.” "
— Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain)

""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.” "
— Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain)