It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not "what he ought to be." If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.
We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity.
The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting
concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.
One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.
Thus, we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong.
If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success .... If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. If a university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably failing in its obligation to society and to the students themselves.
quoted in Kiefer, Thomas Merton: Monk, Poet, Spiritual Writer
To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
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, because smaller things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of suffering.
Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose the big problem is that we would fall down and worship each other.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginning all our lives.
My life and death are not purely and simply my own business. I live by and for others, and my death involves others.
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.
I think a man is known better by his questions than by his answers.
When religion becomes a mere artificial façade to justify a social or economic system — when religion hands over its rites and language completely to the political propagandist, and when prayer becomes the vehicle for a purely secular ideological program, then religion does tend to become an opiate. It deadens the spirit enough to permit the substitution of a superficial fiction and mythology for the truth of life. And this brings about the alienation of the believer, so that his religious zeal becomes political fanaticism. His faith in God, while preserving its traditional formulas, becomes in fact faith in his own nation, class or race. His ethic ceases to be the law of God and love, and becomes the law of might-makes-right: established privilege justifies everything. God is the status quo.
It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God’s will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you — try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God’s will yourself!
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