Thomas Merton Quotes

Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

We are all the foolishness and all the crimes we did. We're also all the kindnesses we did. I hate to think of life as if we understood time. We don't understand time.

You've got to walk and talk with God to go to heaven... I have the devil in me! If I didn't have, I'd be Christian!

I feel like life is much greater than a hero or a villain: there's good people that sometimes make mistakes.

Christianity has aimed to deliver us from a life determined by nature, from the appetites as actuating us, and so has meant that man should not let himself be determined by his appetites.

There have been many times in my life when I felt like I'd never pick up the pieces, but God has always given me the power to do it.

If you want the meaning of families and life and religion and philosophy rolled into one package, all you need to read is 'The Brothers Karamazov.'

Die and born again, die and born again. It's the story of my life.

Christians should be ready for a change because Jesus was the greatest changer in history.

Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.

What makes 'The Wire' a beautiful story is how true to life it is. In other shows, you have a good guy and a bad guy. In 'The Wire,' bad guys are trying to be good, good guys are doing bad. You have real life. The people who do bad get bad things done to them.

There are no perfect politicians - just as there are no perfect pastors or voters. We are all sinners in need of a Savior.

If you look at life with any honesty and intelligence, it's clear that human nature is dark, vile, selfish, and despondent. But I also see a force in human nature, namely grace, that sometimes works against our natural moral entropy.

At the end of the day, one of the biggest misconceptions of Ghost is that it's just about the devil. It's always been about mankind and living.

We are perfect. According to God, we are perfect, yet we know that we are sinners. We believe in the fact that we are both saints and sinners at the same time as we live in this world.

Unbelief will destroy the best of us; faith will save the worst of us.

Although the human heart is selfish and arrogant, so many struggle against their selfishness and learn humility; because of them, as long as there is life, there is hope that beauty lost can be rediscovered, that what has been reviled can be redeemed.

History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essential concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.

And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.

Christians aren't people who never sin or always do the right thing. We're people who live in continual repentance.

Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

Nothing conquers except truth and the victory of truth is love.