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

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.