"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 ...
If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
~ Thomas Merton ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
More Thomas Merton quotes
"By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a ...
"I have my own way to walk and for some reason or other Zen is right in the middle of it wherever I go. So there it is, with all its beautiful purposel...
"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...
"There is not a flower that opens not a seed that falls into the ground and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that do...
"Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
"The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and...
"In other words, I have tried to learn in my writing a monastic lesson I could probably not have learned otherwise: to let go of my idea of myself, to ...
"The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and p...
"Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
"The point where you become free not to kill, not to exploit, not to destroy, not to compete, because you are no longer afraid of death or the devil or...
"Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for spiritual joy. And if you do not know the differ...
"We must be willing to accept the bitter truth that, in the end, we may have to become a burden to those who love us. But it is necessary that we face ...
"Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intenti...
"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 ch...