Quote

We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.

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
Truth
Must
Make
Manifesting
Manifest
Outside
Inside
True

More quotes by 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 God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
Thomas Merton
Image
Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
Thomas Merton
Image
For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another?
Thomas Merton
Image
Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
Thomas Merton
Image
You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.
Thomas Merton
Image
a man can radically change his life and attain to a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making.
Thomas Merton
Image
Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.
Thomas Merton
Image
Love is...like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. I am gift. All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached.
Thomas Merton
Image
The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.
Thomas Merton
Image
We do not exist for ourselves.
Thomas Merton
Image
The end of the world will be legal.
Thomas Merton
Image
If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.
Thomas Merton
Image
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
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
Image
The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.
Thomas Merton
Image
Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.
Thomas Merton
Image
The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.
Thomas Merton
Image
We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
Thomas Merton
Image
Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.
Thomas Merton