Quotes from Thomas Merton
Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.
- Thomas Merton
The only unhappiness is not to love God.
- Thomas Merton
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
The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical.
- Thomas Merton
The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.
- Thomas Merton
To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
- Thomas Merton
In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate.
- Thomas Merton
Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.
- Thomas Merton
The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
- 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
We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.
- Thomas Merton
Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
- Thomas Merton