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.

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

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

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image.

If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.

Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.

Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.

Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.

Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.

What we have to be is what we are.

Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real

When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.

Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat . . . Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that.

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.

I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.

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.

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost

The least of learning is done in the classrooms.

The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.

We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!

The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.

In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.

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

For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness

The end of the world will be legal.

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

Whose silence are you?

Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.

For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.

....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68