Quote

Whose silence are you?

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
Whose
Silence
Wisdom

More quotes by Thomas Merton

Image
Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
Thomas Merton
Image
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
Thomas Merton
Image
The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68
Thomas Merton
Image
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
Thomas Merton
Image
My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me.
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
What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
Thomas Merton
Image
I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it.
Thomas Merton
Image
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
Thomas Merton
Image
If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is just glass.
Thomas Merton
Image
Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
Thomas Merton
Image
To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.
Thomas Merton
Image
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.
Thomas Merton
Image
One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.
Thomas Merton
Image
The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.
Thomas Merton
Image
The whole world has risen in Christ... If God is 'all in all,' then everything is in fact paradise, because it is filled with the glory and presence of God, and nothing is any more separated from God.
Thomas Merton
Image
Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
Thomas Merton
Image
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!
Thomas Merton
Image
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.
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