Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.
THOMAS MERTONTo 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.
More Thomas Merton Quotes
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A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.
THOMAS MERTON -
Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.
THOMAS MERTON -
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
THOMAS MERTON -
For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.
THOMAS MERTON -
The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.
THOMAS MERTON -
Weaknesses and deficiencies play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.
THOMAS MERTON -
Our real journey in life is interior.
THOMAS MERTON -
When 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 MERTON -
Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.
THOMAS MERTON -
Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.
THOMAS MERTON -
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
THOMAS MERTON -
A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all.
THOMAS MERTON -
People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
THOMAS MERTON -
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
THOMAS MERTON -
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
THOMAS MERTON






