Quote

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

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
People
Shining
Telling
Sun
Walking
Grace
Around
Way
Like
Esteem

More quotes by Thomas Merton

Image
The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
Thomas Merton
Image
Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
Thomas Merton
Image
Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
Thomas Merton
Image
Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
Thomas Merton
Image
Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.
Thomas Merton
Image
The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.
Thomas Merton
Image
Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs.
Thomas Merton
Image
The meaning of life is found in openness to being and being present in full awareness.
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
To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.
Thomas Merton
Image
One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us.
Thomas Merton
Image
O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of.
Thomas Merton
Image
The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
Thomas Merton
Image
Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way.
Thomas Merton
Image
Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.
Thomas Merton
Image
May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.
Thomas Merton
Image
How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.
Thomas Merton
Image
For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.
Thomas Merton
Image
The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.
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