Thomas Merton Quotations

Octane Creative has put together a few pages on Thomas Merton. One of these includes a number of quotations from writings of Merton (http://www.octanecreative.com/merton/quotes.html) and an additional page incorporates shorter quotations in beautiful nature images (http://www.octanecreative.com/merton/). I have selected one of the many quotations available on these two pages and copied it below:

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us. We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love – either with another human person or with God.“ - From Love and Living

For other resources on Thomas Merton, see Thomas Merton: Resources for Catholic Educators (http://www.silk.net/RelEd/merton.htm).

PBS has also recently produced a documentary on Merton and has an 11 minute segment of this on its Web sites at (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/november-21-2008/thomas-merton/1378/).