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

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.

There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.

The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable

Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.

True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.

We have what we seek. We don't have to rush after it. It was there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us.

I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.

In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.

Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38

To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything He has given us — and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love.

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.

How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

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.

Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage.

But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact pleases You.

It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.

The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.

If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God you have found.

It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common.

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.

To be unknown to God is entirely too much privacy.

But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others.

What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.

It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.

How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man's city?(100)

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night.

I find I serve the world best by keeping my distance and freedom.