Quote

Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to -- find out both the questions and the answers.

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
Need
Needs
Monarchy
Questions
Asking
Meaning
Answers
Stop
Find

More quotes by Thomas Merton

Image
There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
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
Love is free it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.
Thomas Merton
Image
The only unhappiness is not to love God.
Thomas Merton
Image
May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
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 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
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
We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God
Thomas Merton
Image
Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.
Thomas Merton
Image
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
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 must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will.
Thomas Merton
Image
Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect.
Thomas Merton
Image
Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
Thomas Merton
Image
No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.
Thomas Merton
Image
True encounter with Christ liberates something in us, a power we did not know we had, a hope, a capacity for life, a resilience, an ability to bounce back when we thought we were completely defeated, a capacity to grow and change, a power of creative transformation.
Thomas Merton
Image
Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.
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
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