Thomas Merton

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."

"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."

"Happiness is not something that comes ready-made. It comes from your own actions."

"If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for."

"We are dying from civilisation as from a disease."

"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 in everything, is to be unfaithful to one's own task."

"Love is our true destiny."

"Peace is not the absence of war; it is the presence of justice."

"Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and that no one may ever see any results from it."

"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost."

"The reason we do not trust the power of the spirit is that we do not believe in ourselves."

"Do not pray for happiness that is dependent on things or things that are dependent on happiness, but pray to be free from the slavery of being always dependant on something."

"A man is called to be faithful to his task, not to accomplish it."

"It is a true tragedy that we are what we are."

"The monk is not defined by his task, but by his vision."

"There should be some meaning to our lives here that goes beyond the mere pleasure of following our biological impulses."

"We are dying from civilisation as from a disease. Yet the remedy is not to go back, for we cannot undo what has been done."

"I have what I have found. It is enough."

"The essence of prayer is not asking God for something, but desiring God himself."

"To be a saint means to be myself."

"Our task is not to fight the system but to replace it with a better one."

"To love action is to lose the capacity to love the actor."

"Solitude is necessary for spiritual health."

"He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give."

"The more you own, the more it owns you."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel all their sorrows."

"Learning to love well is the task of all our lives."

"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by non-violent methods most easily succumbs: activism and over-work."

"We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desires to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible."