854 Quotes by Thomas Merton

If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?...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, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

There is no wilderness so terrible, so beautiful, so arid, so fruitful, as the wilderness of compassion. It is the only desert that shall truly flourish like a lily.

To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers.

Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them

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

We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.

he 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.

That is what gives Him the greatest glory—the achieving of great things through the weakest and most improbable means.