Quotes by Thomas Merton
cross the abyss
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.
deepest capacities of our real selves
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
We have what we seek
We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
The beginning of love
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
finding himself
In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
eyes in the center of your heart
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
Art enables us
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
