If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real.
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.
In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation.
The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches.
The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love’s sake.
How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.
In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.
Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate.
The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe.
A daydream is an evasion.
The evil in the world is all of our own making, and it proceeds entirely from our ruthless, senseless, wasteful, destructive, and suicidal neglect of our own being.
The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility.
They were in the world and not of it – not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38.
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.
I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.