Thomas Merton Quotes

I'd reached a point where there was a direct conflict between what I was trying to be and who I really was.

After all, what is your personal identity? It is what you really are, your real self. None of us is what he thinks he is, or what other people think he is, still less what his passport says he is. And it is fortunate for most of us that we are mistaken. We do not generally know what is good for us. That is because, in St. Bernard's language, our true personality has been concealed under the 'disguise' of a false self, the ego, whom we tend to worship in place of God.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

It's hard to live in a blind and aimless - or dishonest, rather - narrative when somebody in your family is going farther toward - or at least think they are and say they are - their true self.

All my work is not personal - I've been trying to get away from that into the true self underneath all the tastes and things we think make up a self.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

Shake yourself free from the manikin you create out of a false interpretation of what you do and what you feel, and you'll at once see that the manikin you make yourself is nothing at all like what you really are or what you really can be!

A person never knows their own true face. Everybody thinks that the phoney, posed social mask they wear is their real face.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

I don't know what else I would be if I wasn't me. I am not looking from the outside, looking back. I am who I am.

A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.

Perhaps we've got so involved in the false selves we project on social media that we've forgotten that our real selves, our private selves, are different, are worth saving.

I think I spent a lot of my mid-twenties thinking it was a problem of my onstage persona. But, actually, it was my actual personality. I was still working out what kind of person I was.

You can spend time self-identifying and figuring out what you are on that, but at some point, you just want to be who you are and not walk around telling people.

Try to figure out who you really are and not who you want other people to think you are.

Anyone who knows who God made them to be will never try to be someone else.

Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.

Awareness is something that is very important. And you say that it looks impossible to become what we really are, to be authentic, to be ourselves again. But I will tell you that it is much more difficult to try to be what we are not.

I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.

To be authentic is to stop pretending to be what think you are, because you are not.

You’ve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really it’s about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to what’s real. -Going Bovine

Whatever mistake you have made about who you are is temporary. Your true identity has remained untouched. You have never sinned against it or affected it in any way except to lose touch with it.

But when I call for a hero, out comes my lazy old self; so I never know who I am, nor how many I am or will be. I'd love to be able to touch a bell and summon the real me, because if I really need myself, I mustn't disappear.

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.