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
less
The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.
technology temptation spirituality
Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.
confusion discipline silence
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.
imagination kind obscure
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
god-love unhappiness
The only unhappiness is not to love God.
opposites want waste
Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which... are just the opposite of what we were made for?
awareness insight
Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
mistake ambition together
But there is no substance under the things I have gathered together about me. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am a mistake.
kentucky chosen sanctification
God has brought me to Kentucky...the precise place he has chosen for my sanctification.
errors tree giants
Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
sense-of-humor gentle theologian
A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent.
despair found i-have-learned
I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.
moon echoes darkness
Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior world must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else's sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun.
sainthood spirituality sanctity
Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else.