854 Quotes by Thomas Merton

We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love everything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are living a caricature of what we are meant to be.

Algunos creen que basta con tener una virtud, como ser bondadoso, indulgente o caritativo, sin preocuparse del resto. Pero si eres altruista de un modo y egoísta de otros veinticinco modos, tu virtud no te hará mucho bien. De hecho, probablemente resultará no ser otra cosa que la variedad vigesimosexta del mismo egoísmo, disfrazada de virtud.

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 the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as 'new men' regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will.

We thank Him less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. It is our emptiness in the presence of His reality, our silence in the presence of His infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which His light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises Him.

Mere sitting at home and meditating on the divine presence is not enough for our time. We have to come to the end of a long journey and see that the stranger we meet there is no other than ourselves—which is the same as saying that we find Christ in him. For if the Lord is risen, as He said, He is actually or potentially alive in every man.

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.

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