Thomas Merton Quotes

May God prevent us from becoming “right-thinking men”-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.

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

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.

Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.

Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

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.

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.