Quote

When ambition ends, happiness begins.

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
Ambitious
Begins
Ambition
Happiness
Ends

More quotes by Thomas Merton

Image
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
Image
Humility is the surest sign of strength.
Thomas Merton
Image
For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.
Thomas Merton
Image
The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable
Thomas Merton
Image
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
Image
We love the things we pretend to laugh at.
Thomas Merton
Image
Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.
Thomas Merton
Image
We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
Thomas Merton
Image
Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
Thomas Merton
Image
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.
Thomas Merton
Image
The land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt from whence thou camest out... For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord...Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near...Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you?
Thomas Merton
Image
Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.
Thomas Merton
Image
My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.
Thomas Merton
Image
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
Thomas Merton
Image
The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.
Thomas Merton
Image
The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.
Thomas Merton
Image
Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us.
Thomas Merton
Image
I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may meanI myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.
Thomas Merton
Image
The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.
Thomas Merton
Image
A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all.
Thomas Merton