What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.


Thomas Merton

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Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.
THOMAS MERTON
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many...
THOMAS MERTON
Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away ...
THOMAS MERTON
For Abelard, the death of Christ on the Cross did not, strictly speaking, redeem man: it only offere...
THOMAS MERTON
And yet with every wound You robbed me of a crime,
And as each blow was paid with Blood,
Y...
THOMAS MERTON
Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it o...
THOMAS MERTON
I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.
THOMAS MERTON
All men who live only according to their five senses, and seek nothing beyond the gratification of t...
THOMAS MERTON
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to t...
THOMAS MERTON
Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all others.
THOMAS MERTON
I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of ...
THOMAS MERTON
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from...
THOMAS MERTON
We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at th...
THOMAS MERTON
We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace ...
THOMAS MERTON
The Bible is not primarily a written or printed text to be scrutinized in private, in a scholar's st...
THOMAS MERTON
It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spirit...
THOMAS MERTON
In this age of crowds in which I have determined to be a solitary, perhaps the greatest sin would be...
THOMAS MERTON
Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
THOMAS MERTON
Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self..We are not very good at recognizing ...
THOMAS MERTON
We thank Him less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. It is our emptiness in...
THOMAS MERTON
The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant thi...
THOMAS MERTON
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not t...
THOMAS MERTON
Please do not look only at the dark side

All the newspapers in the free world explain why...
THOMAS MERTON
The story of the Fall tells us in mythical language that "original sin" is not simply a stigma arbit...
THOMAS MERTON
Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
THOMAS MERTON
The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole...
THOMAS MERTON
If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own,...
THOMAS MERTON
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on th...
THOMAS MERTON
When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your ti...
THOMAS MERTON
I read every book about Buster Keaton and Chaplin to see how they worked - it's all about dedica...
PAUL MERTON
There's something magical about film, it's the ultimate for me, because it's kind of per...
PAUL MERTON
So everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, eva...
MERTON MILLER
Everyone recognizes that's a joke because obviously the number and shape of the pieces doesn'...
MERTON MILLER
I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identifie...
PAUL MERTON
My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the miser...
PAUL MERTON
As an economics undergraduate, I also worked on a part-time basis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a...
MERTON MILLER
You only need to make one big score in finance to be a hero forever.
MERTON MILLER
I was trying to organise my DVDs into a sort of chronological order, and I am afraid that it all tra...
PAUL MERTON
When I wake up on a Monday morning and I realise I don't have to go and work at the civil servic...
PAUL MERTON
If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned ...
PAUL MERTON
When I turned about 12 or 13, I realised that being funny wasn't about remembering jokes. It was...
PAUL MERTON
All disc jockeys are without talent. Noel Edmonds - I can't stand Noel Edmonds.
PAUL MERTON
Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, tha...
MERTON MILLER
When I used to do the Edinburgh Festival, there was a bunch of guys selling fresh oysters and I'...
PAUL MERTON
My research interests since then have shifted strongly towards the economic and regulatory problems ...
MERTON MILLER
The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what ot...
PAUL MERTON
When things are difficult, awful, stressful, the thing that always gets you through is a sense of hu...
PAUL MERTON
Beginning with a trip out to Ellis Island, I saw for myself where thousands of European immigrants t...
PAUL MERTON
We thought it would have significance for practice but nothing of the magnitude that's occurred over...
ROBERT MERTON