Thomas Merton

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

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.

We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.

By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.

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.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.