Quote

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

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
Must
Belong
Giving
Truly
Heart
Another
Something
Doe
Love
Give
Able
Firsts
First
Freely

More quotes by Thomas Merton

Image
The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
Thomas Merton
Image
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.
Thomas Merton
Image
You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
Thomas Merton
Image
The end of the world will be legal.
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
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
Thomas Merton
Image
As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.
Thomas Merton
Image
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
Image
If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is just glass.
Thomas Merton
Image
A daydream is an evasion.
Thomas Merton
Image
Love is an intensification of life.
Thomas Merton
Image
Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us.
Thomas Merton
Image
Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
Thomas Merton
Image
Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.
Thomas Merton
Image
A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.
Thomas Merton
Image
If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.
Thomas Merton
Image
And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
Thomas Merton
Image
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
Thomas Merton
Image
Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
Thomas Merton
Image
October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.
Thomas Merton