Thomas Merton

“True solitude opens you to the whole world.”

“Love is the revelation of our deepest personal meaning, value, and identity.”

“But love can only be revealed in love.”

“You do not love by yourself. You love only because love loves itself in you.”

“You cannot tell me who I am, and I cannot tell you who you are.”

“If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?”

“Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are.”

“That is something you yourself can only discover from within.”

“The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion.”

“Communion is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech. It is beyond concept.”

“Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity.”

“My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not.”

“What we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”

“You will never find interior solitude unless you make some conscious effort.”

“You will never gain peace if you give yourself a hundred ways to be busy.”

“Or, more simply, prayer is awareness of God.”

“The way you prepare for contemplation is to give up everything that is not contemplation.”

“Contemplation is the highest expression of intellectual and spiritual life.”

“The self is not something we find, it is something we create.”