“There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we are made for eternal life, we are made for an act that gathers up all the powers and capacities of our being and offers them simultaneously and forever to God. The blind spiritual instinct that tells us obscurely that our owns lives have a particular importance and purpose, and which urges us to find out our vocation, seeks in so doing to bring us to a decision that will dedicate our lives irrevocably to their true purpose. The man who loses this sense of his own personal destiny, and who renounces all hope of having any kind of vocation in life has either lost all hope of happiness or else has entered upon some mysterious vocation that God alone can understand.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”
Thomas Merton

“There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“How did it ever happen that, when the dregs of the world had collected in western Europe, when Goth and Frank and Norman and Lombard had mingled with the rot of old Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust, and brutality--how did it happen that, from all of this, there should come Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, the commentaries and histories of Bede, the Moralia of Gregory the Great, St. Augustine's City of God, and his Trinity, the writings of Anselm, St. Bernard's sermons on the Canticles, the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf and Langland and Dante, St. Thomas' Summa, and the Oxoniense of Duns Scotus?

How does it happen that even today a couple of ordinary French stonemasons, or a carpenter and his apprentice, can put up a dovecote or a barn that has more architectural perfection than the piles of eclectic stupidity that grow up at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the campuses of American universities?”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, The Seven Storey Mountain

“To allow oneself to be carried away
By a multitude of conflicting concerns,
To surrender to too many demands,
...To commit oneself to too many projects,
To want to help everyone with everything
Is to succumb to violence.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar.”
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“I got to a state where phrases like "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful" filled me with a kind of suppressed indignation, because they stood for the big sin of Platonism: the reduction of all reality to the level of pure abstraction, as if concrete, individual substances had no essential reality of their own, but were only shadows of some remote, universal, ideal essence filed away in a big card-index somewhere in heaven, while the demi-urges milled around the Logos piping their excitement in high, fluted, English intellectual tones.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, The Seven Storey Mountain

“I thought to myself, who is this excellent man Van Doren who being employed to teach literature, teaches just that: talks about writing and about books and poems and plays: does not get off on a tangent about the biographies of the poets or novelists: does not read into their poems a lot of subjective messages which were never thereWho is this man who does not have to fake and cover up a big gulf of ignorance by teaching a lot of opinions and conjectures and useless facts that belong to some other subjectWho is this who really loves what he has to teach, and does not secretly detest all literature, and abhor poetry, while pretending to be a professor of it?...It was because of this virtual scholasticism of Mark's that he would never permit himself to fall into the naive errors of those who try to read some favorite private doctrine into every poet they like of ever nation or every age. And Mark abhorred the smug assurance with which second-rate left-wing critics find adumbrations of dialectical materialism in everyone who ever wrote from Homer and Shakespeare to whomever they happen to like in recent times. If the poet is to their fancy, then he is clearly seen to be preaching the class struggle. If they do not like him, then they are able to show that he was really a forefather of fascism. And all their literary heroes are revolutionary leaders, and all their favorite villains are capitalists and Nazis.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, The Seven Storey Mountain

“I had refused to pay any attention to the moral laws upon which all our vitality and sanity depend: and so now I was reduced to the condition of a silly old woman, worrying about a lot of imaginary rules of health, standards of food-value, and a thousand minute details of conduct that were in themselves completely ridiculous and stupid, and yet which haunted me with vague and terrific sanctions. If I eat this, I may go out of my mind. If I do not eat that, I may die in the night.”
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as "new men" regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one. For even those who might have been there for no better motive than that they were obliged to be, were at least free from any of the self-conscious and human constraint which is never absent from a Protestant church where people are definitely gathered together as people, as neighbors, and always have at least half an eye for one another, if not all of both eyes.”
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“The land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt from whence thou camest out...  For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord...Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near...Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you?”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, The Seven Storey Mountain

“See, see Who God is, see the glory of God, going up to Him out of this incomprehensible and infinite Sacrifice in which all history begins and ends, all individual lives begin and end, in which every story is told, and finished, and settled for joy or for sorrow: the one point of reference for all the truths that are outside of God, their center, their focus: Love.”
Thomas Merton spiritual wisdom quote, The Seven Storey Mountain

“If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favour of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“Nu putem fi în rela?ii de pace cu altii pentru ca nu suntem în relatii de pace cu noi însine, si nu putem fi în relatii de pace cu noi însine pentru ca nu avem pace cu Dumnezeu.”
Thomas Merton, The Living Bread

“The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pleasure in our own good works. The poor and helpless are the first to find Him, Who came to seek and to save that which was lost.”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ.”
Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite


“We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to 'like' one another. Love governs the will: 'liking' is a matter of sense and sensibility. Nevertheless, if we really love others it will not be too hard to like them also.

If we wait for some people to become agreeable or attractive before we begin to love them, we will never begin. If we are content to give them a cold impersonal 'charity' that is merely a matter of obligation, we will not trouble to understand them or to sympathize with them at all. And in that case we will not really love them, because love implies an efficacious will not only to do good to others exteriorly but also to find some good in them to which we can respond.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“We have what we seek. We don't have to rush after it. It was there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us.”
Thomas Merton

“Therefore, doing the Stations of the Cross was still more laborious than consoling, and required a sacrifice. It was much the same with all my devotions. They did not come easily or spontaneously, and they very seldom brought with them any strong sensible satisfaction. Nevertheless the work of performing them ended in a profound and fortifying peace: a peace that was scarcely perceptible, but which deepened and which, as my passions subsided, became more and more real, more and more sure, and finally stayed with me permanently.”
Thomas Merton

“For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“I have my own way to walk and for some reason or other Zen is right in the middle of it wherever I go. So there it is, with all its beautiful purposelessness, and it has become very familiar to me though I do not know "what it is." Or even if it is an "it." Not to be foolish and multiply words, I'll say simply that it seems to me that Zen is the very atmosphere of the Gospels, and the Gospels are bursting with it. It is the proper climate for any monk, no matter what kind of monk he may be. If I could not breathe Zen I would probably die of spiritual asphyxiation.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“A man is a free being who is always changing into himself. This changing is never merely indifferent. We are always getting either better or worse. Our development is measured by our acts of free choice, and we make ourselves by the patterns of our desires.

If our desires reach out for the things that we were created to have and to make and to become, then we will develop into what we were truly meant to be.

But if our desires reach out for things that have have no meaning for the growth of our spirit, if they lose themselves in dreams or passions or illusions, we will be false to ourselves and to other men and to God. We will judge ourselves as aliens and exiles from ourselves and from God.

In hell, there is no recollection. The damned are exiled not only from God and from other men, but even from themselves.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, The Seven Storey Mountain

“The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, The Seven Storey Mountain

“Do not desire chiefly to be cherished and consoled by God; desire above all to love Him.
Do not anxiously desire to have others find consolation in God, but rather help them to love God.
Do not seek consolation in talking about God, but speak of Him in order that He may be glorified.
If you truly love Him, nothing can console you but His glory. And if you seek His glory before everything else, then you will also be humble enough to receive consolation from His hand: accepting it chiefly because, in showing His mercy to us, He is glorified in our souls.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, "Solitude, solitude." And You have turned around and thrown the world in my lap. You have told me, "Leave all things and follow me," and then You have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation?”
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“In the end, it's the reality of personal relationships that save everything.”
Thomas Merton

“In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility of his act, only means faltering and failure. Failure to eliminate evil is itself a defeat. Anything that even remotely risks such defeat is in itself capitulation to evil. The irreversibility of evil then reaches out to contaminate even the tolerant thought of the hesitant crusader who, momentarily, doubts the total evil of the enemy he is about to eliminate. p. 21”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, On Non-Violence

“The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22”
Thomas Merton, On Non-Violence

“The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.”
Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, The Seven Storey Mountain

“The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“For now, oh my God, it is to You alone that I can talk, because nobody else will understand. I cannot bring any other man on this earth into the cloud where I dwell in Your light, that is, Your darkness, where I am lost and abashed. I cannot explain to any other man the anguish which is Your joy nor the loss which is the Possession of You, nor the distance from all things which is the arrival in You, nor the death which is the birth in You because I do not know anything about it myself and all I know is that I wish it were over - I wish it were begun.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, The Seven Storey Mountain

“To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior world must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else's sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun.”
Thomas Merton

“It is by the Holy Spirit that we love those who are united to us in Christ. The more plentifully we have received of the Spirit of Christ, the more perfectly we are able to love them: and the more we love them the more we receive the Spirit. It is clear, however, that since we love them by the Spirit Who is given to us by Jesus, it is Jesus Himself Who loves them in us.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.

Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“It is not merely our own desire but the desire of Christ in His Spirit that drives us to grow in love. Those who seldom or never feel in their hearts the desire for the love of God and other men, and who do not thirst for the pure waters of desire which are poured out in us by the strong, living God, are usually those who have drunk from other rivers or have dug for themselves broken cisterns.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“Bodily agitation, then, is an enemy to the spirit. And by agitation I do not necessarily mean exercise or movement. There is all the difference in the world between agitation and work.

Work occupies the body and the mind and is necessary for the health of the spirit. Work can help us to pray and be recollected if we work properly. Agitation, however, destroys the spiritual usefulness of work and even tends to frustrate its physical and social purpose. Agitation is the useless and ill-directed action of the body. It expresses the inner confusion of a soul without peace. Work brings peace to the soul that has a semblance of order and spiritual understanding. It helps the soul to focus upon its spiritual aims and to achieve them. But the whole reason for agitation is to hide the soul from itself, to camouflage its interior conflicts and their purposelessness, and to induce a false feeling that 'we are getting somewhere'.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitationsHe will accept such work only as a 'means of livelihood' while he waits to discover his 'true vocation'. The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies.”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, Contemplative Prayer





“The wise man has struggled to find You in his wisdom, and he has failed. The just man has striven to grasp You in his own justice, and he has gone astray.

But the sinner, suddenly struck by the lightning of mercy that ought to have been justice, falls down in adoration of Your holiness: for he had seen what kings desired to see and never saw, what prophets foretold and never gazed upon, what the men of ancient times grew weary of expecting when they died. He has seen that Your love is so infinitely good that it cannot be the object of a human bargain.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“Like the prophet Jonas, whom God ordered to go to Nineveh, I found myself with an almost uncontrollable desire to go in the opposite direction. God pointed one way and all my "ideals" pointed in the other. It was when Jonas was traveling as fast as he could away from Nineveh, toward Tharsis, that he was thrown overboard, and swallowed by a whale who took him where God wanted him to go...But I feel that my own life is especially sealed with this great sign, which baptism and monastic profession and priestly ordination have burned into the roots of my being, because like Jonas himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.”
Thomas Merton

“To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”
Thomas Merton

“The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“Those who refuse His mercy satisfy His justice in another way. Without His mercy, they cannot love Him. Without love for Him they cannot be 'justified' or 'made just'. That is to say: they cannot conform to Him Who is love. Those who have not received His mercy are in a state of injustice with regard to Him. It is their own injustice that is condemned by His justice. And in what does their injustice consistIn the refusal of His mercy. We come, in the end, to this basic paradox: that we owe it to God to receive from Him the mercy that is offered to us in Christ, and that to refuse this mercy is the summation of our 'injustice'. Clearly, then, only the mercy of God can make us just, in this supernatural sense, since the primary demand of God's justice upon us is that we receive His mercy.”
Thomas Merton spiritual wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote

“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!" Thomas Merton”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, The Seven Storey Mountain

“One who is content with what he has, and who accepts the fact that he inevitably misses very much in life, is far better off than one who has much more but who worries about all he may be missing . . . the relative perfection which we must attain to in this life if we are to live as sons of God is not the twenty-four-hour-a-day production of perfect acts of virtue, but a life from which practically all the obstacles to God's love have been removed or overcome. One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us— whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need. Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the "one thing necessary" may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“Once the question of grace and free will is reduced to a juridical matter, once witnesses line up with plaintiff or defendant and the jurors strive to determine who is entitled to what, we are inevitably tempted to act as if everything that was given to free will was taken from grace and everything conceded to grace was withdrawn from our own liberty.

On both sides of the debate, whether one is arguing "for grace" or whether one is a defender of "nature," it seems that everyone is more or less obsessed with this great illusion of ownership and possession. What is strictly mine?  How much can God demand of me - how much can I demand of Him.  Even if I come up with the answer that nothing is strictly mine at all, I have still falsified the perspective by asking a foolish question in the first place. "How much is mine?" Should such a question ever be asked?  Should such a division ever be made at all?  To ask such a question makes it almost impossible for me to grasp the paradox which is the only possible answer: That everything is mine precisely because everything is His. If it were not His, it could never be mine. If it could not be mine, He would not even want it for Himself. And all that is His is His very self. All that He gives me becomes, in some way, my own self. What, then is mine?  He is mine. And what is His?  I am His.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, The New Man

“Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.”
Thomas Merton wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

“The married man and the mother of a Christian family, if they are faithful to their obligations, will fulfill a mission that is as great as it is consoling: that of bringing into the world and forming young souls capable of happiness and love, souls capable of sanctification and transformation in Christ.”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“...only God's truth without limit, without defect, without stain. This clean light, which tastes of Paradise, is beyond all pride, beyond comment, beyond proprietorship, beyond solitude. It is in all and for all. It is the true light that shines in everyone, in "every man coming into this world." It is the light of Christ, "Who stands in the midst of us and we know Him not.”

“It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.”

“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”
Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals

“Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.

The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.”
Thomas Merton spiritual wisdom quote, No Man Is an Island

As fragrance is innate to a flower, so too is freedom innate to the heart. Freedom is our essence. This is as obvious as standing out in nature and asking, "Where is nature found?" It's all around you, and in you. When you know "true nature" as such, you wake up, you begin living again, and in some way, you stop dying inside. The Buddha called this realization Nirvana, or the "deathless." This is something you don't actually learn, so much as "feel into" as a progressive set of realizations. It comes from the inside out, and flows through the pores of your entire being. ...  The authentic spiritual life is not about fitting in, or transcending some imaginary self. It's about being a person, obliterating fear, and doing something remarkable with our lives.
...
He [Buddha] said that he made each and every person he met his ultimate object of reverence. In other words, we cannot become free in isolation. 
...
We no longer need to be confined by the motifs of spiritual vs. nonspiritual, dharma vs. adharma, American vs. Tibetan. We are bigger than that.  It's time we evolved a new language of world truths, world dharma, that transcends culture and nationalism, politics and religion, and all forms of tribalism. 
Alan Clements wisdom quote

"'You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,' said Aslan. 'And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.'"  CS Lewis

"You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"You play the hand you're dealt. I think the game's worthwhile."  CS Lewis

"You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built."  CS Lewis spiritual wisdom quote

"You don't have a Soul. You are a Soul. You have a body."  CS Lewis

"You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream." 
"Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease?"  CS Lewis spiritual wisdom quote

"Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?"  CS Lewis

"Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later."  CS Lewis

"When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard."  CS Lewis

"We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it."  CS Lewis spiritual wisdom quote

"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful."  CS Lewis

"We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"We all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men 'after our own heart.' Only they really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread. The little pockets of early Chrstians survived because they cared exclusively for the love of 'the bretheren' and stopped their ears to the opinion of the Pagan society around them. But a circle of criminals, cranks, or perverts survives in just the same way; by becoming deaf to the opinion of the outer world, by discounting it as the chatter of outsiders who 'don't understand,' of the 'conventional,' the 'bourgeois,' the 'Establishment,' of prigs, prudes, and humbugs."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don't."  CS Lewis

"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"The absent are easily refuted."  CS Lewis

"Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."  CS Lewis

"Surely what a man does when he is caught off his guard is the best evidence as to what sort of man he is."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Regarding the debate about faith and works: It’s like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most important."  CS Lewis quote

"Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Perfect humility dispenses with modesty."  CS Lewis

"Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased."  CS Lewis

"Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell."  CS Lewis spiritual wisdom quote

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."  CS Lewis

"Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it."  CS Lewis

"Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." CS Lewis quote

"No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power." 
"Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair."  CS Lewis quote

"Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see."  CS Lewis quote

"Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man."  CS Lewis spiritual wisdom quote

"Many things--such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly--are done worst when we try hardest to do them."  CS Lewis

"Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal."  CS Lewis quote

"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable." 
"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from." CS Lewis wisdom quote

"It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous." CS Lewis quote

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." CS Lewis wisdom quote

"It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves." CS Lewis

"It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations." CS Lewis spiritual wisdom quote

"It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.'' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter." CS Lewis

"In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by the group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say." CS Lewis wisdom quote

"If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love."  CS Lewis quote

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this."  CS Lewis spiritual wisdom quote

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."  CS Lewis

"If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?" CS Lewis wisdom quote

"If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally."  CS Lewis quote

"If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons."  CS Lewis quote

"If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of 'religion.'"  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."  CS Lewis

"If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?"  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents - the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts - i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy - are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be trueI see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It's like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business."  CS Lewis

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself."  CS Lewis quote

"I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare."  CS Lewis

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."  CS Lewis spiritual wisdom quote

"Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it."  CS Lewis quote

"Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regretThere are better things ahead than any we leave behind."  CS Lewis

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"God is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him."  CS Lewis quote

"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all."  CS Lewis quote

"Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerableQuite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you."  CS Lewis quote

"Badness is only spoiled goodness."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."  CS Lewis quote

"Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"All that is not eternal is eternally out of date."  CS Lewis

"Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth thrown in. Aim at Earth and you get neither."  CS Lewis quote

"Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere--'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous."  CS Lewis quote

"A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you."  CS Lewis quote

"A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride."  CS Lewis wisdom quote

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell."  CS Lewis quote

"A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional...values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process."  CS Lewis wisdom quote