Thomas Merton

"If you want to be a monk, you must not think you are better than people in the world."

"You do not have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."

"At the present time, when the whole world is in a state of confusion and fear, I believe it is essential that those who are trying to follow Christ should be absolutely clear in their understanding of the Gospel."

"That darkness which you are experiencing is the greatest sign of His presence."

"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

"We are dying from civilisation and the remedy is not less civilisation but more humanity."

"My Lord and my God, take from me everything that distances me from you."

"The chief duty of every human being is the pursuit of beauty."

"Words about God always imply a choice: to say something is to exclude something else."

"Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the 'one thing needful' is and in gladly relinquishing all the rest."

"We cannot understand true peace if we make no effort to understand ourselves."

"Just as the atom is the unit of matter, so should the human person be the unit of society."

"There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality."

"The gift of friendship is a precious one. Do not neglect it."

"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy."

"I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace."

"Do not be too quick to assume that your enemy is a fiend, nor too slow to assume that your friend is not."

"We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity."

"The beginning of the journey back to God is the acceptance of the fact that you have wandered."

"We carry our sicknesses with us everywhere we go."

"The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other."

"Art is the effort of man to express in beautiful form the truth about himself and the world."

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves."

"God speaks to us in the language of nature."

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

"The person who has truly found Christ has found life itself."

"A life completely dedicated to purely human ends is a life of despair."

"I believe that I am not, by myself, a complete human being."

"The business of theology is not to supply ready-made answers to every human problem, but to give us the principles with which an answer can be worked out."

"There must be a time when you stop expecting other people to make you happy or unhappy on purpose."