Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.
We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of others and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love.
He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.
I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place … It is certainly part of my life of prayer.
The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.
The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.
Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love.
In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.
Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.
The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.
Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.
For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.
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.
Spread abroad the name of Jesus in humility and with a meek heart; show him your feebleness, and he will become your strength.
Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.
For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.
May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.
To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
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
Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.
Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
...love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all, but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day.
Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.
One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.
The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.
Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.
The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.
We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.
Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.
Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance.
Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.
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.
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.
I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.
The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
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
No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception.
On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
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.
In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.