Quotes from Thomas Merton

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.

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.

Attachment to spiritual things is.. just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.

God created man, and man returned the favor.

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.

We do not exist for ourselves...

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.