No Man Is an Island

by Thomas Merton

For it seems to me that the first responsibility of a man of faith is to make his faith really part of his own life, not by rationalizing it but by living it.

This division cannot be healed by a love that places itself only on one side of the rift. Love must reach over to both sides and draw them together. We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves.

life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.

A love, therefore, that is selfless, that honestly seeks the truth, does not make unlimited concessions to the beloved.

To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair.

Beauty is simply reality itself, perceived in a special way that gives it a resplendent value of its own.

Without our knowing it, we see reality through glasses colored by the subconscious memory of previous experiences.

There are religious men who have become so familiar with the concept of God’s will that their familiarity has bred an apparent contempt.

It is better to do His will with a weak, but deliberate co-operation than to do His will unconsciously, unwillingly, and in spite of myself.

After that we must solve all our doubts by testing them with His known will, and by doing what is uncertain only in the light of what is certainly His will.

He does not need our sacrifices, He asks for our selves.

Only a man who works purely for God can at the same time do a very good job and leave the results of the job to God alone.

For the aim of the contemplative life is not merely to enable a man to say prayers and make sacrifices with a right intention: it is to teach him to live in God.

The Cross of Christ says nothing of the power of suffering or of death. It speaks only of the power of Him Who overcame both suffering and death by rising from the grave.

No one man is ever called to suffer merely for the sake of suffering.

Jesus had pity on the multitudes not only because they were sheep without a shepherd, but also simply because they had no bread.

The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.

Sometimes no explanation is sufficient to account for suffering. The only decent thing is silence—and the sacraments.

We cannot suffer well unless we see Christ everywhere—both in suffering and in the charity of those who come to the aid of our affliction.

add to his stature one cubit?” (Matthew 6:27). But we cannot use created things without anxiety unless we are detached from them. At the same time, we become detached from them by using them sparingly—and yet without anxiety.

We give Him the best we have, in order to declare that He is infinitely better. We give Him all that we prize, in order to assure Him that He is more to us than our “all.”

We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul which is the principle of all our acts.

The less he is able to be the more he has to do.

A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him.

In moments of wildest idealism he may take it into his head to make other people happy: and in doing so he will overwhelm them with his own unhappiness.

Everything depends on the quality of our acts and our experiences.

And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all.

One who is content with what he has, and who accepts the fact that he inevitably misses very much in life, is far better off than one who has much more but who worries about all he may be missing.

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

If we have no rest, God does not bless our work.

It is true that we make many mistakes. But the biggest of them all is to be surprised at them: as if we had some hope of never making any.

We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs.

He Who loves us means by this to leave us room for our own freedom, so that we may dare to choose for ourselves, with no other certainty than that His love will be pleased by our intention to please Him.

The one thing that really decides a vocation is the ability to make a firm decision to embrace a certain state of life and to act on that decision.

We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to “like” one another. Love governs the will: “liking” is a matter of sense and sensibility. Nevertheless, if we really love others it will not be too hard to like them also.

Each one of us becomes completely himself when, in the Spirit of God, he is transformed in Christ.

The desire for love is itself a beginning of love, and from the moment we desire more we already have more: and our desire is itself the pledge of even more to come.

For a hope that rests on temporal power or temporal happiness is not theological. It is merely human, and has no supernatural strength to give us.

What you think of me depends on what you think of yourself.

Our frankness is often spoiled by a hidden barbarity, born of fear.

A man of sincerity is less interested in defending the truth than in stating it clearly, for he thinks that if the truth be clearly seen it can very well take care of itself.

And yet our idea of ourselves is so fantastically unreal that we rebel against this lack of “love” as though we were the victims of an injustice.

We can have the mercy of God whenever we want it, by being merciful to others: for it is God’s mercy that acts on them, through us, when He leads us to treat them as He is treating us.

This is the way in which God’s mercy fulfills His divine justice: mercy and justice seem to us to differ, but in the works of God they are both expressions of His love.

Anxiety is fatal to recollection because recollection depends ultimately on faith, and anxiety eats into the heart of faith.

But fear that is holy cannot fear love. It fears the discrepancy between itself and love,

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people.

How tragic it is that they who have nothing to express are continually expressing themselves, like nervous gunners, firing burst after burst of ammunition into the dark, where there is no enemy.