Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O.was an American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion. In 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and given the name Father Louis...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth31 January 1915
CityPrades, France
CountryUnited States of America
charity given left
Charity is without fear: having given all that it has, it has nothing left to lose.
religious writing men
Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.
love-you love-is rewards
Love is its own reward....
inspirational love-you wells
If you have love you will do all things well.
peace world ifs
If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.
wisdom peace demand
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.
charity spirit holy
It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.
wisdom thinking hair
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.
wisdom spiritual worry
Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.
wisdom communication speech
The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept.
rain night long
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
love-is
Love is an intensification of life.
wisdom end-of-the-world world
The end of the world will be legal.
prayer way
Prayer is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him...who loves us, who is near to us...