Inspirational Quotes by Thomas Merton

“At Cincinnati, where we arrived about dawn, I asked the Traveller’s Aid girl the name of some Catholic churches, and got in a taxi to go to St. Francis Xavier’s, where”

“instead of becoming a strong and ardent and generous Catholic, I simply slipped into the ranks of the millions of tepid and dull and sluggish and indifferent Christians who live a life that is still half animal, and who barely put up a struggle to keep the breath of grace alive in their souls.”

“The Breviary was hard to learn, and every step was labor and confusion, not to mention the mistakes and perplexities I got myself into. However,”

“I, who had always been anti-naturalistic in art, had been a pure naturalist in the moral order. No wonder my soul was sick and torn apart: but now the bleeding wound was drawn together by the notion of Christian virtue, ordered to the union of the soul with God.”

“Después del latín, me parece que no hay lengua tan apropiada para la oración y para hablar de Dios como el español, pues es una lengua a la vez fuerte y ágil, tiene su precisión, tiene en sí la cualidad del acero, que le da la exactitud que necesita el verdadero misticismo y, empero, es suave, también, gentil y flexible, lo que requiere la devoción, es cortés, suplicante y galante; se presta, de modo sorprendente, muy poco a la sentimentalidad. Tiene algo de la intelectualidad del francés, pero no la frialdad que la intelectualidad toma en el francés; nunca desborda en las melodías femeninas del italiano. El español no es nunca un idioma débil, nunca flojo, aun en los labios de una mujer.”

“...The more I think of them, the more I realize that I must certainly owe the Privats for more than butter and milk and good nourishing food for my body. I am indebted to them for much more than the kindness and care they showed me, the goodness and the delicate solicitude with which they treated me as their own child, yet without any assertive or natural familiarity.... That was why I was glad of the love the Privats showed me, and was ready to love them in return. It did not burn you, it did not hold you, it did not try to imprison you in demonstrations, or trap your feet in the snares of its interest.”

“Self-will…is not identical to the will of the new creation—to the will which one finds in renouncing oneself, in the unity of the Body of Christ, wherein the canons of the Church make us recognize a common and individual will. Not the properties of an individual nature, but the unique relationship of each being with God—a relationship by the Holy Spirit and realized in grace—is what constitutes the uniqueness of a human person.”8”

“JMJT February 1, 1942. Septuagesima.”

“To see how seriously men take things and yet how little their seriousness profits them. Their tragedy makes our mediocrity all the more terrible.”

“They knew a good building would praise God better than a bad one, even if the bad one were covered all over with official symbols of praise.”

“For since man has decided to occupy the place of God he has shown himself to be by far the blindest, and cruelest, and pettiest, and most ridiculous of all the false gods.”

“My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. So what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”

“Love is our destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone, we find it with another.”

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

“The tighter you squeeze the less you have.”

“Our landlord, Mr. Duggan, ran a nearby saloon. He got in trouble with Father for helping himself to the rhubarb which we were growing in the garden. I remember the grey summer dusk in which this happened. We were at the supper table, when the bended Mr. Duggan was observed, like some whale in the sea of green rhubarb, plucking up the red stalks. Father rose to his feet and hastened out into the garden. I could hear indignant words. We sat at the supper table, silent, not eating, and when Father returned I began to question him, and to endeavour to work out the morality of the situation. And I still remember it as having struck me as a difficult case, with much to be said on both sides. In fact, I had assumed that if the landlord felt like it, he could simply come and harvest all our vegetables, and there was nothing we could do about it. I mention this with the full consciousness that someone will use it against me, and say that the real reason I became a monk in later years was that I had the mentality of a medieval serf when I was barely out of the cradle.”

“Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.”

“• الحاكم المستنير يضع خططه مقدماً، والقائد الناجح يرعى مصادره وجنوده (عن طريق الثواب والعقاب والمكافآت).”

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

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