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
spiritual humble humility
On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless.
cost care shapes
If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.
inspirational happiness order
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
music reading blue
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 deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
wisdom passion order
We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.
revolution transformation endless
We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation.
play important weakness
Weaknesses and deficiencies . . . play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.
wisdom men risk
Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.
greatness achieve interest
We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great.
mistake destiny race
It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.
prayer expression who-we-are
Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.
men enlightenment sitting
A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass
life wisdom men
A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.
inspirational moon sailing
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?