Quotes from Thomas Merton

the hypostatic union, or the union of the divine and human natures in the One Person of the Word, the God-Man, Jesus Christ, was not only a truth of the greatest, most revolutionary, and most existential actuality, but it was the central truth of all being and all history.

Real self-conquest is the conquest of ourselves not by ourselves but by the Holy Spirit. Self-conquest is really self-surrender.

Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death.

The very first step to a correct understanding of the Christian theology of contemplation is to grasp clearly the unity of God and man in Christ, which of course presupposes the equally crucial unity of man in himself.

Existential dread] is the profound awareness that one is capable of ultimate bad faith with himself and with others: that one is living a lie.

Hullo, Brother," I said. He recognized me, glanced at the suitcase and said: "This time have you come to stay?" "Yes, Brother, if you'll pray for me," I said. Brother nodded, and raised his hand to close the window. "That's what I've been doing," he said, "praying for you.

your eyes must turn, again and again, to the House that hides the Sacramental Christ!

L'amore è il nostro vero destino. Non troviamo il significato della vita da soli, lo troviamo assieme a qualcun altro.

I cannot discover God in myself and myself in Him unless I have the courage to face myself exactly as I am, with all my limitations, and to accept others as they are, with all their limitations.

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality

Grace, which is charity

There is only now.

We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others. What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean, first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.

When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve.

To be an acorn is to have a taste for being an oak tree. Habitual grace brings with it all the Christian virtues in their seed.

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.

Over and over again I have to make small decisions here and there, in regard to one or other. Distractions and obsessions are resolved in this way. What the resolution amounts to, in the end: letting go of the imaginary and the absent and returning to the present, the real, what is in front of my nose.

Is the basic teaching of Buddhism—on ignorance, deliverance and enlightenment—really life-denying, or is it rather the same kind of life-affirming liberation that we find in the Good News of Redemption, the Gift of the Spirit, and the New Creation?

True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared.

Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God. For

they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.

If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault. It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires. Prayer

All theology is a kind of birthday Each one who is born Comes into the world as a question For which old answers Are not sufficient…

The truth I must love in my brother is God Himself, living in him. I must seek the life of the Spirit of God breathing in him. And I can only discern and follow that mysterious life by the action of the same Holy Spirit living and acting in the depths of my own heart.