Thursday, December 10, 2009

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

Thomas Merton in his Own Words




Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience. Thomas Merton

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.

Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.

The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.

The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.



No comments: