Thomas Merton Quotes

You change your life by changing your heart.

Who you are becoming is more important than what you are accumulating.

Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.

It’s not what you do – it’s what you are becoming.

Transformation is not a future event. It is a present activity.

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Life’s all about the revolution, isn’t it? The one inside, I mean. You can’t change history. You can’t change the world. All you can ever change is yourself.

You can't be born again, but you can change.

I was a punk. I think that's why I'm such a good person now, because I was such a bad guy then.

Before you can do something you must first be something.

You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass. Change may be announced by a small ache, so that you think you're catching cold. Or you may feel a faint disgust for something you loved yesterday. It may even take the form of a hunger that peanuts won't satisfy. Isn't overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent. And isn't discontent the lever of change?

Regeneration can come only through a change of heart in the individual.

One of the things I said was that I had been in great hopes that I would become a better person as a result of confronting my own mortality, but it actually never happened. I didn't become a better person.

Transformation literally means going beyond your form.

I think the thing about keeping your character fresh is, when you change as an individual, you have to flow with it.

I don't want to go on stage with anger. And that's why I worked so hard to look within and change myself and evolve.

We learn and grow and are transformed not so much by what we do but by why and how we do it.

We are apt to think that everything that happens to us is to be turned into useful teaching; it is to be turned into something better than teaching, into character. We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to teach us something but to make us something.

What you are the world is. And without your transformation, there can be no transformation of the world.

You must change your life.

The most important task of your life is not what you do, but who you become.

As our thought is opened and we behold the image of eternity within ourselves, we are changed by this image into a newness of life.

Remember that transformation is a present activity.

As a character, it's very interesting to play someone who wants to change their life and have him change it.