Quotes from Thomas Merton

Before we can see that created things (especially material) are unreal, we must see clearly that they are real.

As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be "as gods." We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives.

Far from ruining the purity of solitary prayer, petition guards and preserves that purity. The solitary, more than anyone else, is always aware of his needs before God. ... His prayer is an expression of his poverty. Petition, for him, can hardly become a mere formality, a concession to human custom, as if he did not need God in everything.

All things are yours and you are Christ's—and Christ is God's. If we live, we live unto God. If we die, we die unto God—whether we live or die, we are God's possession." What more could anyone ask?

He is heard only when we hope to hear Him, and if, thinking our hope to be fulfilled, we cease to speak, His silence ceases to be vivid and becomes dead, even though we recharge it with the echo of our own emotional noise.

For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God.

No man who simply eats and drinks whenever he feels like eating and drinking, who smokes whenever he feels the urge to light a cigarette, who gratifies his curiosity and sensuality whenever they are stimulated, can consider himself a free person. He has renounced his spiritual freedom and become the servant of bodily impulse. Therefore his mind and his will are not fully his own. They are under the power of his appetites.

Si ascendero in coelum, tu illic es. Si descendero in infernum, ades.

Humility is the surest sign of strength.

As regards your chestnuts: you are going to have three measures in the morning and four in the afternoon.

The perfection of twelfth-century Cistercian architecture is not to be explained by saying that the Cistercians were looking for a new technique. I am not sure that they were looking for a new technique at all. They built good churches because they were looking for God. And they were looking for God in a way that was pure and integral enough to make everything they did and everything they touched give glory to God.

Our sorry idiot life, our idiot existence, idiot not because it has to be but because it is not what it could be with a little more courage and care.

Concupierunt concupiscentiam in deserto. . . . Numquid poterit parare mensam populo suo?

Coercion from outside, strong temperamental inclinations and passions within ourselves, do nothing to effect the essence of our freedom. They simply define its action by imposing certain limits on it.

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.

El Greco is not for a lot of people and perhaps he never was. That is, he is plenty complex, and most people cannot get at him all at once because they are not all that complex themselves.

What Zen communicates is an awareness that is potentially already there but is not conscious of itself. Zen is then not Kerygma but realization, not revelation but consciousness, not news from the Father who sends His Son into this world, but awareness of the ontological ground of our own being here and now, right in the midst of the world.

Tom offered me a cigarette. The implication was that I was going to need it. Therefore, obviously, I refused it.

The life of the spirit, by integrating us in the real order established by God, puts us in the fullest possible contact with reality--not as we imagine it, but as it really is.

Instead of worshipping God through His creation we are always trying to worship ourselves by means of creatures. But

Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart; eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life. And, with those eyes, those interior eyes, open upon that coldness, I lay half asleep and looked at the visitor, death.

In the Father the infinite Love of God is always beginning and in the Son it is always full and in the Holy Spirit it is perfect and it is renewed and never ceases to rest in its everlasting source. But if you follow Love forward and backward from Person to Person, you can never track it to a stop, you can never corner it and hold it down and fix it to one of the Persons as if He could appropriate to Himself the fruit of the love of the others.

What a strange thing! In filling myself I had emptied myself

March 1 FIRST EMBER SATURDAY IN LENT Last night it snowed again and there is a fairly thick blanket of snow on the ground and on the trees. The sky looks like lead and seems to promise more. It is about as dark as my own mind. I see nothing, I understand nothing. I am sorry for complaining and making a disturbance. All I want is to please God and to do His will.