Inspirational Quotes by Thomas Merton

“If it is awakened, it communicates a new life to the intelligence in which it lives, so that it becomes a living awareness of itself: and this awareness is not so much something that we ourselves have, as something that we are. It is a new and indefinable quality of our living being.”

“• عمل القائد هو أن يبقى هادئاً فيضمن السرية، وأن يكون مستقيماً وعادلاً، فيضمن استقرار النظام العام.”

“El que se enfrenta al oponente durante varios años para luchar por la victoria en una batalla decisiva, pero que por su codicia y su anhelo de honores, permanece ignorante de la situación del oponente; está totalmente desprovisto de humanidad. Un hombre así no tiene nada de comandante, no es un apoyo para su soberano y no es el dueño de la victoria.”

“He who does not know theevilsof war cannot appreciate its benefits,”

“• قارن بحرص جيش العدو بجيشك، لتقف على نقاط القوة المفرطة، وتلك الناقصة.”

“For at sixteen I had imagined that Blake, like the other romantics, was glorifying passion, natural energy, for their own sake. Far from it! What he was glorifying was the transfiguration of man’s natural love, his natural powers, in the refining fires of mystical experience: and that, in itself, implied an arduous and total purification, by faith and love and desire, from all the petty materialistic and commonplace and earthly ideals of his rationalistic friends.”

“There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who.”* He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am.”

“Was there any possibility of happiness without faith? Without some principle that transcended everything we had ever known? The house in Douglaston, which my grandparents had built, and which they maintained for twenty-five years with the icebox constantly full and the carpets all clean and fifteen different magazines on the living-room table and a Buick in the garage and a parrot on the back porch screaming against the neighbor's radio, was the symbol of a life that had brought them nothing but confusions and anxieties and misunderstandings and fits of irritation. It was a house in which Bonnemaman had sat for hours every day in front of a mirror, rubbing cold-cream into her cheeks as if she were going to go to the opera—but she never went to the opera, except, perhaps, the ones she saw before her in her dreams as she sat there, in peaceless isolation, among the pots of ointment.”

“Once you have grace," I said to him, "you are free. Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don't really want to do.”

“Therefore beware of the contemplative who says that theology is all straw before he has ever bothered to read any.”

“As the car was turning around to start down the avenue John Paul turned around and waved, and it was only then that his expression showed some possibility that he might be realizing, as I did, that we would never see each other on earth again.”

“There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. We must remember that this superficial “I” is not our real self. It is our “individuality” and our “empirical self” but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God. The “I” that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions and talks about itself is not the true “I” that has been united to God in Christ.”

“PRAYER and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.”

“In one sense we are always travelling, and travelling as if we did not know where we were going. In another sense we have already arrived.”

“All sorrow, hardship, difficulty, struggle, pain, unhappiness, and ultimately death itself can be traced to rebellion against God’s love for us.”

“I will give you what you desire. I will lead you into solitude. I will lead you by the way that you cannot possibly understand, because I want it to be the quickest way.” "Therefore all the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude.” … “All the good things that other people love and desire and seek will come to you, but only as murderers to cut you off from the world and its occupations.”

“El mayor mérito no consiste en ver la victoria cuando ya está clara para todo el mundo; la mayor de las victorias no es, en absoluto, la que es aclamada por todos sin excepción. No se quiere mucha fuerza levantar una pluma; no hay que tener una visión perfecta para ver el sol, ni un oído agudo para escuchar un trueno. Estar preparado para cualquier circunstancia es lo que garantiza una victoria segura, porque significa que estáis combatiendo contra un enemigo que ya está derrotado.”

“وتروي المخطوطات الصينية أن "سون أتزو وو" والمعروف اختصارا باسم "سون أتزو" كان مواطنا وجنديا في مملكة "تشي”

“• اغزُ البلاد الخصيبة من أجل إمداد جيشك بالطعام.”

“• المقاتل الباسل سيكون رهيباً في هجومه، متأنياً عند اتخاذه لقراراته.”