Quote

Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered.

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
Moral
Spiritual
Action
Everything
Cleansed
Enough
Depths
Must
Depth
Good
Actions

More quotes by Thomas Merton

Image
Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which... are just the opposite of what we were made for?
Thomas Merton
Image
When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.
Thomas Merton
Image
The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
Thomas Merton
Image
We do not exist for ourselves.
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
Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.
Thomas Merton
Image
My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.
Thomas Merton
Image
We love the things we pretend to laugh at.
Thomas Merton
Image
Whose silence are you?
Thomas Merton
Image
The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
Thomas Merton
Image
Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
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
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
Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
Thomas Merton
Image
By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Thomas Merton
Image
To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.
Thomas Merton
Image
And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.
Thomas Merton
Image
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
Image
Love is our true destiny.
Thomas Merton
Image
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton