Thomas Merton Quotes

A materialist age makes neurotics of those who measure their life in minutes. Teetotalling totalitarians know the cost of life, but not the value.

The philosophical point is that our happiness and wellbeing is not based on incomes rising. This is not just the wisdom of sages but of ordinary people. Prosperity is more social and psychological: it's about identification, affiliation, participation in society and a sense of purpose.

Let's be honest; it's rather easy to be busy. We all can think up a list of tasks that will overwhelm our schedules. Some might even think that their self-worth depends on the length of their to-do list. They flood the open spaces in their time with lists of meetings and minutia - even during times of stress and fatigue.

Human beings are much bigger than just making money.

Too many people today know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I feel terrible that I once put too much emphasis on material prosperity.

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

I have no plans to retire. It's the perfect combination of work and play that keeps you young. If I quit work it would be the beginning of the end for me.

The money never mattered. I'm not kidding you. It hasn't really brought me any kind of happiness.

There are many things that I value, and many of them have nothing to do with my salary.

I don't need five Ferraris in my garage to feel great; that's not what matters to me.

Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.

The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.

If men are to respect each other for what they are, they must cease to respect each other for what they own.

The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol.

If I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler.

Riches ennoble a man's circumstances, but not himself.

Why should I stop working? If I do, I'll die and it'll all be finished. 'm lucky to work in the most perfect of conditions. I can do what I want in all kinds of areas. The expenses are not expenses. I would be stupid to stop that. Work is making a living out of being bored.

Young people coming up who are having difficulty with their so-called celebrity need to get back into their lives. It's your life and you can't let the fact that you do something pretty good take away the joy of it.

I'm a firm believer in if you work hard you should play hard. So I try to keep my life as balanced as possible to keep my sanity.

... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow; The rest is all but leather and prunello.

As we got more interested in time management and productivity, we lost the individual, and with that individual loss, we lost happiness as well. So I think the world has actually been malnourished as we've focused so much on productivity and ignored happiness and meaning to our own detriment.

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

I don't know that anyone in the United States is taught to rest.