Thomas Merton Quotes

People must have righteous principals in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.

And one of the elders of the city , said , speak to us of good and evil. And he answered : You are good in countless ways , and you are not evil when you are not good .

There is no wrong time to do the right thing.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you.

Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value — we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct.

I do not believe with the Rochefoucaults and the Montaignes that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues. I believe a great abatement from that proportion may be made in favor of general honesty.

The truth is that goodness is hardwired in humanity.

I firmly believe there are no bad people.

I'd always found goodness more interesting then evil, though I was aware this wasn't the most general view. To my mind, it took more work and more courage to be good, an opinion continually reinforced by my own shortcomings.

The feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

While one is asleep one cannot do anything that is good. Virtue is impossible in unconsciousness, only sin is possible. Unconsciousness is the source of sin.

You can't be right by doing wrong; you can't be wrong by doing right.

An educated person must learn to act justly, beginning, first of all, with his thoughts, then later in his deeds. That is what it means to be educated.

When goodness is lost, it is replaced by morality.

Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries - but it is a force stronger than crime.

Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

Over the last few years, I've been focusing on questions having to do with the self, and questions having to do with morality. I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.

I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.

A man who knows all goods and all truths, as many as can be known, but does not shun evils, knows nothing.

People are either good or they're not. Religion doesn't make anybody good, I don't think.

Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are.

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.