Thomas Merton Quotes

Is sobriety all that we are to expect of a spiritual awakening? No, sobriety is only a bare beginning; it is only the first gift of the first awakening. If more gifts are to be received, our awakening has to go on. As it does go on, we find that bit by bit we can discard the old life - the one that did not work - for a new life that can and does work under any conditions whatever.

I am my own sanctuary and I can be reborn as many times as I choose throughout my life.

I believe we are most beautiful when we are constantly shedding our old selves and moving into new light.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin.

You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

Ignore your previous experience and go into the moment. Be Here Now. See what there is to work with right now in creating yourself anew. Life is an ongoing, never-ending process of re-creation.

When you start to crack open, don't waste a moment gathering your old self up into something like you knew before. Let your new self splash like sunlight into every dark place and laugh and cry and make sounds you never made & thank all that is holy for the gift.

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.

In the past few years I have begun the process of becoming a new man.

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Black Rock gives us all a chance to heal, to become ourselves.

I used to believe that people are only born once, but now I feel I have been reborn, like I was given a new life. I see myself as a child, full of energy and hope.

I guess if you have an original take on life, or something about you is original, you don't have to study people who came before you. You don't have to mimic anybody. You just have a gut feeling inside, an instinct that tells you what's right for you, and you can't do it in any other way.

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

I have always been interested in the idea of self-reinvention.

You know, Motorcycle Diaries has no incredible stories, no sudden plot twists, it doesn't play that way. It's about recognizing that instance of change and embracing it.

Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again.

Change is growth. For me it has been a very spiritual and musical rebirth.

Being born again means you have a new concept of yourself.

There's a rebirth that goes on with us continuously as human beings. I don't understand, personally, how you can be bored. I can understand how you can be depressed, but I just don't understand boredom.