“In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself, and in order to live have to die.”

 

No Man Is An Island

“ . . . anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.”

“A selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.”

“It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others.”

“Nothing at all makes sense, unless we admit, with John Donne, that: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.'”

 

The Wisdom of the Desert

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?”

“The Fathers were humble and silent men, and did not have much to say. They replied to questions in a few words, to the point . . . their brevity is refreshing, and rich in content.”

“Love, of course, means something more than mere sentiment, much more than token favours and perfunctory almsdeeds. Love mean an interior and spiritual identification with one's brother, so that he is not regarded as an ‘object' to ‘which' one ‘does good.'”

 

The Way of Chuang Tzu

“I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or to anyone else. He is far too great to need any apologies from me.”

“The way of Tao is to begin with the simple good with which one is endowed by the very fact of existence.”

“Chuang Tzu's paradoxical teaching that ‘you never find happiness until you stop looking for it' must not, therefore, be negatively interpreted.”

 

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

“The contemplative life is unfortunately too often thought of in terms purely of ‘enclosure,' and monks are conceived of as hothouse plants, nursed along in a carefully protected and spiritually overheated prayer of life.”

“People are constantly trying to use you to help them create the particular illusions by which they live.”

“The last thing a salesman wants is for the buyer to become content. You are of no use in our affluent society unless you are always just about to grasp what you never have.”

 

Other Thomas Merton Books

The Seven Storey Mountain

The Sign of Jonas

Zen and the Birds of Appetite

Thoughts on the East

The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

A Vow of Conversation

The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton

The Inner Experience

Echoing Silence

Contemplation in a World of Action