Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.
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.
If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.
Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.
True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
No one can find God without having first been found by Him. A monk is a man who seeks God because he has been found by God.
….it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.
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.
Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!
A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.
Art enables us to find ourselves and loose ourselves at the same time.
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.
The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God’s creation to bear witness for itself.
When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
To allow oneself to be carried awayBy a multitude of conflicting concerns,To surrender to too many demands,…To commit oneself to too many projects,To want to help everyone with everythingIs to succumb to violence.
We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real…and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295)
I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.
True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.
For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.
We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pleasure in our own good works. The poor and helpless are the first to find Him, Who came to seek and to save that which was lost.
We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!
The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace.
Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38
Pardon all runners,All speechless, alien winds,All mad waters.Pardon their impulses,Their wild attitudes,Their young flights, their reticence.When a message has no clothes onHow can it be spoken.
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
He’s not a safe safe or a tame God, securely lodged behind the bars of a distant Heaven; He has the most annoying manner of showing up when we least want Him; of confronting us in the strangest ways.
The deepest need of our darkness is to comprehend the light which shines in the midst of it.
I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.
But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny….To work out our identity in God.
The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.
The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.
Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything.
One came out of the church with a kind of comfortable and satisfied feeling that something had been done that needed to be done, and that was all I knew about it.
The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22
In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him.
All theology is a kind of birthdayEach one who is born Comes into the world as a questionFor which old answersAre not sufficient…
Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
Into this world, this demented innin which there is absolutely no room for him at all,Christ comes uninvited.
Be still:There is no longer any need of comment.It was a lucky windThat blew away his halo with his cares,A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
My mother was informing me, by mail, that she was about to die, and would never see me again.
The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless … beyond speech … beyond concept.
Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for spiritual joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and spiritual joy you have not yet begun to live.
The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.
Finally, I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.
It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.
The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.
My life is … a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me.
We have what we seek. It is there all the time and if we give it time it will make itself known to us.
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to “like” one another.
I will not fear for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the 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.
There is not a flower that opens not a seed that falls into the ground and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the greatness and the mercy of God to the whole world.
I will not fear for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Violence is essentially wordless and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.
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.
Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.
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.
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.
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.
The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.
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.
October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.
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.
Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
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.
Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.
We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.