Quote

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.

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
Conclusion
Insight
Finally
Ambition
Highest
Coming
Already
Happiness
Mindfulness

More quotes by Thomas Merton

Image
Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.
Thomas Merton
Image
It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.
Thomas Merton
Image
To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.
Thomas Merton
Image
To be truly Catholic is not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also and above all to be able to enter into the problems and the joys of all, to understand all, to be all things to all.
Thomas Merton
Image
Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.
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
The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.
Thomas Merton
Image
God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You!
Thomas Merton
Image
The end of the world will be legal.
Thomas Merton
Image
The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.
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
The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Thomas Merton
Image
There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.
Thomas Merton
Image
Love is its own reward.
Thomas Merton
Image
That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.
Thomas Merton
Image
Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything, or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into the infinite further responsibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise. Beyond all and in all is God.
Thomas Merton
Image
Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
Thomas Merton
Image
Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.
Thomas Merton
Image
Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.
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