Thomas Merton

"The task of the intellectual is to articulate the deepest longings of the human spirit."

"We are called to be instruments of peace in a world of violence."

"Faith is the acceptance of mystery without the demand for proof."

"Our deepest desires point us toward the transcendent."

"The greatest adventure is the exploration of one's own consciousness."

"We cannot truly love others until we have learned to love ourselves rightly."

"The written word has power because it allows us to communicate across time and space."

"Despair is the price of trying to live without God."

"We must learn to distinguish between what we need and what we merely desire."

"The greatest deception is the belief that we are separate from one another."

"Imagination is the faculty by which we apprehend truth beyond reason."

"We are healed not by forgetting the past but by reinterpreting it."

"The power of words lies not in their denotation but in their connotation."

"We must resist the tyranny of the urgent and focus on the important."

"Love is the only force that can transform the human heart."

"The contemplative person sees the sacred in the ordinary."

"We are all responsible for the world we create together."

"The truth that makes us free is always a truth about love."

"Life is a series of gratuitous gifts that call forth gratitude."

"We must learn to listen not just with our ears but with our hearts."

"The deepest prayer is the sigh that cannot be uttered in words."

"We are not meant to be gods but to be human in the fullest sense."

"The greatest act of courage is to face ourselves honestly."

"We live in a time of unprecedented connectivity and unprecedented loneliness."

"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 only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is a complete negation of you."

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may never see any results. But you are not asked to see results; you are asked to be faithful."

"We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time."

"To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that I am made for relationship with God."