“Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real.”
— Thomas Merton
“Perhaps I am stronger than I think.”
“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.”
“If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.”
“You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.”
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
“Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.”
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.”
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.”
“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.”
“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”
“To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.”
“A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.”
“Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.”
“To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.”
“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, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”
“A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God.”
“Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.”
“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds”
“In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.”
“Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.”
“When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you.”
“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”
“The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.”
“The sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.”
“People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”
“The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.”
“Our real journey in life is interior; It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary to respond to that action.”
“There is in all visible things – a hidden wholeness.”
“Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring.”
“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”
“The meaning of life is found in openness to being and “being present” in full awareness.”
“Every breath we draw is a gift of God’s love; every moment of existence is a grace.”
“When ambition ends, happiness begins.”
“Humility is the surest sign of strength.”
“We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.”
“In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom.”
“Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.”
“For me to be a saint means to be myself.”
“Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.”
“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
“If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.”
“Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live.”
“The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.”
“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.”
“My God, I pray better to you by breathing. I pray better to you by walking than by talking.”
“We do not exist for ourselves.”
“A faith that is afraid of other people is not faith at all.”
“One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.”
“May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.”
“For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”
“One has to be alone, under the sky, Before everything falls into place and one finds his or her own place in the midst of it all. We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature.”
“The root of war is fear.”
“Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.”
“Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.”
“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.”
“The great thing, and the only thing, is to adore and praise GOD.”
“If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work.”
“Love is the door to eternity.”
“Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.”
“I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
“True happiness is found in unselfish Love, A love which increases in proportion as it is shared.”
“There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.”
“I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.”
“Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.”
“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.”
“You are made in the image of what you desire.”
“My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.”
“Whose silence are you?”
“True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.”
“Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.”
“The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.”
“True encounter with Christ liberates something within us, a power we did not know we had, a capacity to grow and change.”
“Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.”
“What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?”
“Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.”
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs; activism and overwork.”
“Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.”
“Take more time, cover less ground.”
“Today will never come again.”
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?”
“We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.”
“To hope is to risk frustration. Make up your mind to risk frustration.”
“The gate of heaven is everywhere.”
“That is God’s call to us – simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.”
“The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.”
“For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.”
“Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”
“For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another?”
“Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false Self. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.”
“The end of the world will be legal.”
“The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.”
“Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.”
“Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind.”
“The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.”
“If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.”
“When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us.”
“One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.”
“Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.”
“This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first.”
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