Thomas Merton

"Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life."

- Thomas Merton

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."

- Thomas Merton

"Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another."

- Thomas Merton

"Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone — we find it with another."

- Thomas Merton

"There is only one desire: to find the promised land and the freedom of a pure love that is without concern for anything else but love."

- Thomas Merton

"Love seeks only one thing: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward."

- Thomas Merton

"Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real."

- Thomas Merton

"Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order."

- Thomas Merton

"Without love and compassion for others, our own apparent love for Christ is fiction."

- Thomas Merton

"You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope."

- Thomas Merton

"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous."

- Thomas Merton

"God knows us from within ourselves, not as objects, not as strangers, not as intimates, but as our own selves."

- Thomas Merton

"If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for."

- Thomas Merton

"The biggest temptation is to settle for too little."

- Thomas Merton

"The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer because smaller things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of suffering."

- Thomas Merton

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."

- Thomas Merton

"Into this world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ comes uninvited."

- Thomas Merton

"But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God."

- Thomas Merton

"Into this world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited."

- Thomas Merton

"October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all."

- Thomas Merton

"To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything."

- Thomas Merton

"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."

- Thomas Merton

"We are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are."

- 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