Quote

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

Thomas Merton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas Merton
Age: 53 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 15
Died: 1968
Died: December 10
Autobiographer
Catholic Priest
Essayist
Journalist
Peace Activist
Poet
Theologian
Trappist Cistercian Monk
Writer
Thomas Feverel Merton
Father Louis
Men
Either
Life
Spiritual
Desire
Shaped
Spirit
Spirituality
Two
Serve
Ends
God
Live
Image
Made
Masters

More quotes by Thomas Merton

Image
The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.
Thomas Merton
Image
There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
Thomas Merton
Image
Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.
Thomas Merton
Image
The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.
Thomas Merton
Image
I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing to be my rescue and my shelter and my home.
Thomas Merton
Image
The only unhappiness is not to love God.
Thomas Merton
Image
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
Thomas Merton
Image
I came with the notion of perhaps saying something for monks and to monks of all religions because I am supposed to be a monk. ... My dear brothers, WE ARE ALREADY ONE. BUT WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE NOT. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are
Thomas Merton
Image
Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.
Thomas Merton
Image
How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.
Thomas Merton
Image
We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!
Thomas Merton
Image
... but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.
Thomas Merton
Image
When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.
Thomas Merton
Image
A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.
Thomas Merton
Image
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
Image
Love is the door to eternity.
Thomas Merton
Image
Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.
Thomas Merton
Image
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
Thomas Merton
Image
It seems to me that the darkness that has troubled you ... comes from one very serious source. Without wanting to be in conflict with the truth and with the will of God, we are actually going against God's will and His teaching.
Thomas Merton
Image
We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pleasure in our own good works. The poor and helpless are the first to find Him, Who came to seek and to save that which was lost.
Thomas Merton