Thomas Merton citations

Page 2

“If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.”

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image.”

“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”

“Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.”

“But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.”

“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.”

“Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.”

“A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.”

“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.”

“To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that Love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.
Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.”

“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds”

“The biggest human temptation is … to settle for too little.”

“If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.”

“Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.”

“What we have to be is what we are.”

“The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.”

“When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.”

“Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat… Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that.”

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

“For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.”

“I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.”

“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost”

“Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.”

“Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.”

“The least of learning is done in the classrooms.”

“We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real… and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295)”