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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
Thomas Merton
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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
Trees
Greenhouses
Errors
Greenhouse
Kept
Poisonous
Tree
Planted
Become
Giant
Wells
Grain
Well
Giants
Innocently
Error
Grains
More quotes by Thomas Merton
Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake.
Thomas Merton
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
The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.
Thomas Merton
May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
Thomas Merton
To Serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one's neighbor.
Thomas Merton
People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
Thomas Merton
What do you want to want to be, anyway? I don't know I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic. What you should say--he told me--what you should say is that you want to be a saint.
Thomas Merton
Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence.
Thomas Merton
They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
Thomas Merton
To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.
Thomas Merton
Our real journey in life is interior.
Thomas Merton
In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
Thomas Merton
A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all.
Thomas Merton
The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity.
Thomas Merton
For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture.
Thomas Merton
Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
Thomas Merton
I came with the notion of perhaps saying something for monks and to monks of all religions because I am supposed to be a monk. ... My dear brothers, WE ARE ALREADY ONE. BUT WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE NOT. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are
Thomas Merton
Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
Thomas Merton
Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found.
Thomas Merton
His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.
Thomas Merton
