854 Quotes by Thomas Merton

The desire to kill is like the desire to attack another with a red hot iron. I have to pick up the incandescent metal and burn my own hand while burning the other person. Hate itself is the seed of death in my own heart while it seeks death of another. Love is the seed of life in my own heart while it seeks the good of another.

In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.

Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.

Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.

If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is "just glass."

A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.

For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.