Thomas Merton Quotes

Many a time freedom has been rolled back - and always for the same sorry reason: fear.

Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.

Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love.

Some rules are there for a reason - but it's one thing to have a rule that protects and another to have rules that stifle.

What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?

A summer breeze can be very refreshing; but if we try to put it in a tin can so we can have it entirely to ourselves, the breeze will die. Our beloved is the same. He is like a breeze, a cloud, a flower. If you imprison him in a tin can, he will die. Yet many people do just that. They rob their loved one of his liberty, until he can no longer be himself. They live to satisfy themselves and use their loved one to help them fulfill that. That is not loving; it is destroying.

It's strange, isn't it, how the idea of belonging to someone can sound so great? It can be comforting, the way it makes things decided. We like the thought of being held, until it's too tight. We like that certainty, until it means there's no way out. And we like being his, until we realize we're not ours anymore.

If you love something, Let it go, If it comes back it's yours, That's how you know kno-o-ow Nonsense, Christina Aguilera! I say, 'If you love it, file it away under "Things I love". If it's required at a later date, you'll know exactly where it i-i-i-is.

It all depends on whether you have things, or they have you.

As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

It's difficult to put into words what freedom feels like. You only know what freedom feels like if you know what it feels like to not be free.

If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were.

I don't want to live like a prisoner.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

Muzzle a dog and he will bark out of the other end.

If you ever want something badly, let it go. If it comes back to you, then it's yours forever. If it doesn't, then it was never yours to begin with.

We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

If men are not kept straight by duty, they must be by fear. The more they are kept by fear, the less they are free.

It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free.