Thomas Merton

Bekannte Zitate von Thomas Merton

When ambition ends, happiness begins.

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

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.

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.

Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.

The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.

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.

The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

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

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

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.

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.