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
mean giving firsts
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.
christian religious humility
Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.
technology temptation spirituality
Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.
wind tree pine-trees
Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn't already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
men thinking police
May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
best-love love-one-another bounds
We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to "like" one another.
attitude real fundamentals
The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
wisdom destiny want
For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.
eternity contemplation this-life
Contemplation is the loving sense of this life, this presence and this eternity.
philosophy philosophical love-is
The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life.
spiritual gratitude realization
Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, and fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source.
despair may hopeless
A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.
wisdom true-life life-is
We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.
contemplative-life law down-and
One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.