Thomas Merton Quotes

Women love to be called cruel, even when they are kindest.

People love to hate. I have a love-hate relationship with the world. The world loves to hate me.

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up with besides my primal sincerity. I like sincerity. I lack sincerity.

I think I wear my hypocrisy on my sleeve. I would never say I'm not a complete hypocrite.

I like to tease people. I hate when people do it to me, though.

Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?

I don't lie," I lied.

There are “well-known secrets” out there and there are people who are “so happy they could die.” Sometimes people are so sad they have to laugh and sometimes things feel so wrong, they’re right. Basically what I’m saying is, I usually don’t know what people are talking about.

The world laughs at things it would really prefer to admire, and like Aesop's fox it criticizes things it covets.

Everybody loves a winner, but nobody loves a winner.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.

This is getting funny, but there ain't nobody laughing.

Modest about our national pride - and inordinately proud of our national modesty.

I dont like quotes. You can quote me on that.

I can't talk politics with my cousin because he's such a hypocrite. He's against the death penalty and he hanged himself.

Love is as bitter as the dregs of sin, As sweet as clover-honey in its cell; Love is the password whereby souls get in To Heaven--the gate that leads, sometimes, to Hell.

America is such a paradoxical society, hypocritically paradoxical, that if you don't have some humor, you'll crack up.

What would we do without irony? Check out your own daily reliance on it, the foul-weather friend who's there for you when nothing else is.

There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.