No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.
THOMAS MERTONNo one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.
THOMAS MERTONBe good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.
THOMAS MERTONNot all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.
THOMAS MERTONWhen your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.
THOMAS MERTONLove 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.
THOMAS MERTONThe man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.
THOMAS MERTONThe more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.
THOMAS MERTONThe purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
THOMAS MERTONEvery breath we draw is a gift of God’s love; every moment of existence is a grace.
THOMAS MERTONViolence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.
THOMAS MERTONPride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
THOMAS MERTONOurs 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.
THOMAS MERTONThe beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
THOMAS MERTONWhat do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting 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.
THOMAS MERTONActions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
THOMAS MERTONArt enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
THOMAS MERTON