Thomas Merton

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.

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

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.

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.

On the last day of January 1915, in the second year of the Great War, down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into this world.

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

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.

I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.

Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.

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.

We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.

Attachment to spiritual things is... just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.

The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.

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.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

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.